


Push

by Anonymississippi



Series: I'm Not Gonna Write You a Love Song [3]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Assisted Suicide, Danny x Carmilla, F/F, Future AU, Grey areas, Hurt/Comfort, Murder-Suicide, Or Is It?, Silas University, lawstein - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-09 20:27:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3263270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wanna push you around, well I will, well I will. I wanna push you down, well I will, well I will.</p><p>I wanna take you for granted. </p><p>Carmilla doesn't resist when Danny suggests leaving for good. There's a difference in leaving together and being left behind. She fears the latter above all else; knows what it's like to lose a lover. And maybe, in some nuanced, incomprehensible way, she knows the fear and uncertainty that comes with losing a soul mate. </p><p>A decision, a flashback, and a result, all pushing them toward an inexorable ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue/Epilogue

“Are you sure about this?”

“Definitely.”

“Any regrets?”

“Just one.”

“What’s that?”

“You,” Danny confessed. Because really, she could do worse than the truth with imparted last words. “Not loving you sooner.”

“Danny—”

“You asked,” Danny placed her hands on the tops of Carmilla’s shoulders and maneuvered her so she was facing the ochre-bricked _Silas University_ sign.

“C’mon, let’s get set up,” Danny said, and dropped her fingers from the padding of the black leather.

The vampire still smelled of cigarettes and snow; Danny would recall it fondly (for these last five minutes of her life) as her favorite scent.

“We really shouldn’t linger. It’ll only dampen our resolve.”

“You can’t just say things like that,” Carmilla grumbled.

Danny lumbered over to the edge of the Silas boundary. She stripped off her coat and scarf; registered the cold against her nerve receptors. _Needed_ , this one last time, to remember chilling goose pimples. Needed to remember feeling, pleasant or uncomfortable. Where they were going… who knew if they would feel anything?

“Oh yeah?” Danny’s teeth chattered rhythmically, like the beat of that belligerent woodpecker that had set up shop outside of her cabin during decade thirteen. “You gonna do something about it, Nightwalker?”

“Daniele—”

“Come at me.”

“No,” Carmilla insisted, her denial rebounding off of the campus buildings with sonorous intensity.

“That’s how this works,” Danny said, hopping from toe to toe with anxious fortitude.

Danny moved, bounced, slung two arms across her torso so they clapped her opposite shoulder blades and _stretched_ , like she was gearing up for a boxing match. Come hell or high water Danny Lawrence was not going to leave this world passively. She wouldn’t leave static. This wasn’t something that was going to _happen_ to them; it was something they would have to _do_.

“You run at me, we see the other side,” Danny explained.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m not. I’m just tired of… this,” Danny gestured to a deserted Silas.

The piney wreaths hung from frosted windowsills ornamented with droopy, lethargic-looking bows. Shoddy fairy lights had been strung between the light posts on the Quad. The large fir tree the Zetas had chopped and dragged onto campus for their Christmas themed ‘Hot Toddies and Hotties’ mixer still listed slightly to the left, macramé decorations and popcorn strings picked bare by the cafeteria ladies’ crows and the rest of Silas’s avian population.

“Even though I’m here?” Carmilla asked, forcing Danny to tear her gaze from the main campus. “You… want to leave even though I’d… I mean, I would… I’d stay with you. I’ve told you that, many times over.”

“And I know how much you love to repeat yourself,” Danny chirped lightly. Carmilla’s face brokered no amusement. “Carm… you’re the only thing that’s stopped me from doing this sooner, you know?”

“I don’t.”

“Take it as a compliment,” Danny puffed against her fingers; they were growing numb in the dry, frigid air. It they didn’t do this soon, she’d never be able to hold the stake in place. But if Carmilla did eventually run at her and the stake slipped? If it skittered and merely glanced the ribcage instead of hitting its fatal home? That would leave Danny over the line and dead, Carmilla remaining alive and alone. Which was its own type of hell, possibly worse than the one Danny would experience. Danny stuck her hands under her armpits with ferocious purpose. She wasn’t about to let that happen.

Not again.

_These things sometimes repeat themselves. Remarkably few variables change._

Not this time, Danny thought.

Carmilla stared down at the sloshy ground before her. Mud and the remnants of a murky snow congealed into grody clumps of frozen earth. Danny watched as Carmilla dug her combat-booted toe into the sludge. She didn’t meet the redhead’s gaze when she confessed:

“I do want to do this, I’m prepared but… I’m so afraid.”

“Well,” Danny’s lips twitched in crooked satisfaction, a curved scythe of worn enamel and a sad sort of joy. “That makes two of us, Dead Girl.”

“You… you’ve got the stake?”

Danny held up the stick of wood and shook it, almost in greeting. Waving at the afterlife. Signaling their arrival to the unknown, like some immortal ground control agent directing them to their place in line, awaiting their chthonic gondola ride.

Danny placed the stick at the very bottom of her sternum, pointed tip aimed for Carmilla’s paralyzed heart.

“This… we’re really doing this,” Carmilla murmured. “This is… is…”

“It’s time, Carm. Past time,” Danny said, and inched slowly toward the boundary.

The wind picked up and sleet bit into her eyes; tears welled and settled on her lashes, like from the painful burn of embers stoked at the base of a dying bonfire. Where everything (everyone) goes up in smoke. Two extremes with similar results: Frozen. Burning. Ruined. Why had they played into the whole irreconcilable binaries thing for so long, all the while knowing (or at the very least, suspecting) that they would succumb to an inevitability? It would have made the passing centuries blissfully simpler.

Too bad the pair of them were stubborn as wooden posts.

“But I love you so much,” Carmilla choked, and it was still new and fragile enough that Danny’s stomach fluttered at the admission.

“I know… Isn’t that sad?” Danny asked cryptically, and stretched her free arm outward toward the invisible boundary. The skin at her fingers started peeling back like crispy peach flakes of ash.

“I love you, Carmilla,” Danny intoned, and took another step across the line.

The pulsing boundary of Silas stripped the skin from her arm, a razor peeler for human flesh. She could see her tendons melt; her bones disintegrate. An acid net draped over the boundary like some damning curtain that, once broached, dissolved her skeleton into its most basic parts: cells into atoms into dust on the air.

It hurt so much that it definitely felt like death. Definitely felt like freedom.

“AAAHHH! Carm!” Danny cried.

“Daniele!”

Carmilla ran into her arms and hit Danny with all the force her supernatural constitution afforded. The vampire stuttered, then hacked licorice-dark bubbles up as the tip of the stake burst through her torso and emerged in an obstinate point between her shoulder blades. Danny Lawrence flew backwards across the boundary screaming into Carmilla’s fiery black mouth, and, quite literally, died on a vampire’s lips.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flashback in flashes and flames: And I don't know if I've ever been really loved / By a hand that's touched me, well I feel like something's gonna give / And I'm a little bit angry.

_Six Years Previously_

The dryad from south campus she’d been hanging out with was really… well, _clingy_ wasn’t the right term. Willow had latched on and taken root, so when Danny didn’t stick around to stroke her rather superficial ego, (as well as other places; the girlish spirit _was_ a nature demigoddess who happened to be exceedingly pretty… and available, a permanent fixture of the campus) Willow had taken it rather personally.

“I mean, it’d be nice to have someone to talk to who kinda knows what I’m going through,” Danny said at the onset of the—Danny hesitated to call it a friendship. She didn’t know the proper protocol for interacting with tree spirits. Willow had practically proposed a unification ceremony when Danny had shown up one afternoon with a watering can and a bottle of Miracle-Gro as a gag gift.

“Since I’m stuck here and you’re stuck to your… uhm… tree,” Danny said.

“Talking! Yes, of course, I love talking!” Willow exclaimed, but used up so much of her energy during her gleeful skipping episode that she had to re-fuse to the trunk and Danny hadn’t been able to collect any information at all.

Being semi-corporeal wasn’t the only problem. Danny was (for justifiable reasons, she kept insisting) taking advantage of the poor sapling. The south campus grove stood apart from the other wooded areas within the Silas bounds and held the reputation for being the least hostile. Primarily because the inhabitants tended to be flighty horticultural majors from ages past, linked to the spirits of the grove trees through a germinating experiment snafu or from exposure to a bad batch of pesticide that resulted in molecular-rearranging effects. Nevertheless, the southern dryad grove was still tree at heart, and therefore connected to the root system running beneath the grounds. The rumors on the wind of the Serewood reforestation were increasing in substantiality, and the trees, no matter how willowy their resolve, knew all the ways and whispers of the breeze. Danny just had to cozy up to one long enough to get some information.

And she was doing a damn fine job of it, until Dead Girl showed back up and ruined everything.

“I knew you were growing desperate for company, Red Vine, but dryads? Really?” Carmilla snickered at Danny, who was consoling a (literally) weeping Willow at the base of her tree.

Something about disrespectful youths carving love initials into her trunk without any regard for her own perpetually single status.

“A bit more high maintenance than I’d have pegged you for,” Carmilla purred.

Danny turned pink along the apples of her cheeks, but tried to deflect for the sake of the crying girl—shrub—spirit, whatever, she currently had tucked under her shoulder.

“Well, well, look what dragged in the cat,” Danny greeted.

“W—w—who’s that?” Willow blubbered, and the drooping leaves around them began to shake.

“An old—” Danny caught herself before she could say ‘friend’. Just because Carmilla was her best friend didn’t mean Danny would give the nightwalker the pleasure of knowing she’d stepped up from ‘tolerable undead presence’.

“Nobody. She’s just an old bat who likes to stir up trouble.”

“What’s s-s-she doing here?” Willow hiccupped.

Really, the oversensitivity could be endearing at times, but the constant waterworks were dampening Danny’s t-shirts and spirits.

“Lemme go check. You just stay… uh, here,” Danny said, which in hindsight probably wasn’t the best directive. It was one thing to be tied to the campus boundaries of Silas for the rest of her immortal life. It was another to only be able to travel a twenty-foot circumference from the tree that possessed half of your soul.

It wasn’t often that Danny counted herself lucky. Times when she did were almost always mundane, and thus, more cherished for their apparent obviousness. They usually coincided with Carmilla’s arrival, which wasn’t a point Danny wanted to stew over.

“You’re conversing with grass in my absence now,” Carmilla quipped, setting off down the hill from where the dryad grove grew. “It took everything in me not to make a boorish comment on your penchant for landscaping bushes.”

“I guess I’m supposed to thank you for your restraint,” Danny said, tone flat as pavement.

“You’re very welcome,” Carmilla gestured with a delicate palm and a dip of the head.

“It’s not for that kind of company.”

“Sure, sure, whatever helps you sleep at night, Big Red. Or should I say, whoever?”

“There’s enough young visiting professors in and out of here for conferences to take care of stuff like… well, you know.”

Danny and Carmilla hitched a left at the foot of the hill and bypassed the sidewalk leading toward the class buildings. They strode along the campus periphery with familiar steps and familiar repartee, easing back into an unarticulated comfort.

“I most certainly do, but I’d prefer not to linger on the mental image of your ginormous self writhing in the throes of debauched carnality with the arboreal sprites. All that foliage… not to mention the twigs.”

“Oh my god, you make it sound so much worse than it is!” Danny screwed up her face and shook her head, doing her best not to think of what she might have to do to get the information she needed. She hadn’t even considered splinters… _there_.

“That kind of stuff hasn’t been on my mind in a while anyway,” Danny admitted.

“Dry spell?” Carmilla asked, waggling her eyebrows salaciously.

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Decades?”

“Maybe not decades—”

“It happens,” Carmilla said plainly. Danny braced herself for a punch line that never came. “When you’re constantly moving around, not making any genuine connections, sex doesn’t have the appeal it once did.”

“I’m not moving around.”

“But you’re not making connections, either.”

“How long did you go?” Danny asked as they crunched through the wood. “I mean, like, is it normal if you’re only thinking about one per—”

“It’s normal if you’re a supernatural being who retains a sense of—”

“Decency?” Danny supplied.

“I was going to say humanity,” Carmilla responded, and the answer settled over the pair like an awkward shield neither could wield in proper defense of self.

Danny gnawed on the air and blinked at the dusky horizon.

“But really, how long did you go?” she asked, itching for just what might be considered ‘normal’ as far as immortality went. It’s not like she had a wellspring of information to draw from. Carmilla was, regretfully, one of her only (and certainly her closest of) sources.

“I’ll tell you my span if you tell me yours, Snapdragon.”

“On second thought, I’d rather not give you any more information to torture me with,” Danny deflected, passing across the glimmer barrier that shielded prying eyes from her cabin in the Silas woods. Carmilla followed dutifully behind, hands tucked into the pockets of her leather bomber jacket.

“That long, huh?”

Danny pushed open the door to her cabin and threw her bag down by the door.

“So, the trees,” Danny said, back to Silas threats. A typical conversational trajectory. “Seems we’ve got an invasion on our hands.”

“Hardly good for you, since you choose to live like a flea-ridden hermit in the middle of the forest.”

“You came back to save me? I’m touched.”

“Hardly, Gingersnap. But I couldn’t have the place where I stow all of my books go up in flames.”

Carmilla sashayed to the left side of the cabin, running her fingers over the sanded shelves Danny had put together somewhere around the early seventh decade. Back when storage simply couldn’t hold anymore, just before the worldwide paper shortage when books were classified as unsustainable, which then catapulted their worth to that of rare commodity. Carmilla’s texts were mixed in with Danny’s, the vampire insisting that shelving by author’s last name remained the most efficient means of finding titles. Danny liked that the cases looked more impressive with both collections intermingled; her titles less lonely, Carmilla’s less imposing.

“Roots,” Danny corrected. “They’ll go up—down? In roots.”

“Whatever.”

“When are you just going to admit you missed me?” Danny prodded. “Your time away keeps getting shorter and shorter, don’t think I haven’t noticed.” Danny filled the kettle and pressed a button on the stove. The gas release clicked, and a tiny flamed _whoomphed_ into existence.

“You’re overestimating my fondness for you,” Carmilla replied. “Maybe I just know you can’t handle everything on your own.”

“Two things I got from that,” Danny started, and held up a finger. “One: you _are_ fond of me. At least a little bit.”

Carmilla rolled her eyes so hard Danny was amazed her pupils didn’t get lodged in her skull. The vampire plopped down in the chair by the hearth Danny had mentally cataloged as ‘the nightwalker’s space’. Carmilla settled in, legs spread inelegantly, middle finger held aloft, stare aimed resolutely out the window.

“Two: when have you ever done anything more than gripe about helping me?” Danny asked, sticking two tea bags into mugs. She opened the fridge and found a bag of blood that was still fresh enough to drink. Carmilla had barely been gone two weeks this time.

“I may gripe, but I do _assist_ ,” Carmilla rebutted. “It’s not kind of you to disregard my involvement.”

“I’ll be sure to write your name on the calendar the next time you contribute,” Danny said, adding a splash of blood over the bag of chamomile. “Who knows? If you do something really cool, I might even get you a star sticker!”

“Bite me.”

“Now, now, we both know how you get when the canines start to nibble—”

“That was _one_ time, Danny! That little saber tooth hardly knew what he was doing.”

“As evinced from the prehistoric tiger skin I’ve got on the floor and the photo files I’ve stored on my hard drive,” Danny snickered, ridiculously happy that her best friend (yeah, okay, she’s her best friend, what of it?) was back on campus. She strode across the floor of the cabin, arms extended, mission ago. “Bring it in, Dead Girl.”

“Do I have to? You smell like the air freshener used car salesmen string up from the rearview.”

“But I’m being so congenial! I make you tea every time you come home, for fuck’s sake.”

“Home? Is that what this is?”

“Of course it is,” Danny said, grabbing Carmilla’s uncooperative wrist and yanking her to her feet. Carmilla nudged her to escape, but Danny crushed her close. Theirs was relational tug-of-war, constant push-pulls of admissions and concessions and truculent acceptance. “Let’s not have you go all broody over being homeless and lonely and unloved. I freaking hate that.”

“You act like I’m none of those things.”

“Because you _aren’t_ any of those things, you hemoglobin-slurping imbecile.”

Carmilla tensed in Danny’s arms and tried to shake off the embrace. She succeeded in dislodging Danny’s chin from the top of her head, and was able to crane her neck back far enough to catch the _you’re my best friend and there’s nothing you can do to get yourself out of it_ look from the gargantuan ginger currently holding her captive. Danny looked down at a skeptical, sculpted eyebrow, and harrumphed when Carmilla settled into the engulfing embrace. They hugged it out as they had been doing for years (with Danny initiating and Carmilla protesting, for decades and decades and decades) and marveled at the new spark of _something_ kindling below the surface. Something novel and intriguing enough that Danny lingered unintentionally, shallow breaths puffing over the crown of Carmilla’s head.

“Okay, I know you said you’d been through a dry spell,” Carmilla began, “but this is getting ridiculous.”

“Ha, sorry,” Danny said, and released her.

Carmilla squeezed her side and offered a genuine sad smile that morphed suddenly into a leer:

“If it’s really that much of an issue, I’d be a good friend and help you scratch an itch.”

“Uh, no thanks there, Seductress of the World,” Danny declined, slinking back toward the kitchen. “I’d probably catch a venereal disease.”

“Excuse you,” Carmilla rebuked. “I was offering out of the kindness of my heart. As if you could land me anywhere outside of your wildest dreams.”

“Night terrors, maybe,” Danny teased.

“As much fun as this little reunion has been,” Carmilla flopped back in her chair and reached for the pen and paper that rested habitually on the end table beside her. A red blood ring crinkled the cover of the journal, a domestic manifestation neither acknowledged. “Should I start brainstorming recourses by which to defeat sentient forests with dimension-altering capabilities?”

“Yeah, we better get to work,” Danny sighed, moving the stack of books she’d found on haunted wooded areas toward the dining room table. “Although, it’s just trees. I really don’t think it could be any worse than that Lochness monster wannabe that camped out in the lake.”

“Or that dreadful choir of goblins, with the chanting and the tunneling and the choreography—”

“Point is, we’ve seen worse,” Danny said, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “What could go wrong?”

The kettle shrieked in response.

 

* * *

  

Everything went wrong.

Silas burned rapidly.

Danny should’ve known better than to ask for outside help. _She_ was the guardian. Protecting Silas was _her_ job, no one else’s. But she was woefully unequipped to handle a swarming overgrowth: like when trunks busted through the tile in the boy’s bathroom of the engineering building; when vines clawed their way through the planks of the basketball court in the gymnasium; when pollen drifted in wafty, skin-searing globs and lit upon the flesh of unsuspecting passersby.

It wasn’t an invasion; it was absorption. The Serewoods, with their voracious appetites for land, soil, earth, and _space_ , didn’t care that buildings stood in their way. They overwhelmed the campus anatomy like a verdant virus; crawling ivies like greedy fingers crushed the bell tower in their grip; kudzu suffocated the sidewalks and split the admissions building at the head of the Quad in two; perennial vines wrapped themselves around students like boa constrictors so often that the infirmary was overrun with bruised ribs and fractured forearms.

The grounds keeping crew had trained for situations like this, but Danny didn’t expect them to raze the place with flamethrowers and ignited chain saws.

Which brought her to the irascible conflagration, and the exhausting measures she was taking to preserve what little benign natural life still stood on Silas property.

From the tree tops.

Of a forest.

That was currently burning to the ground.

“Carm, watch out for those branches!” Danny hollered from behind her handkerchief.

The Bottomless Bucket of the Bartimaeus Djinni sloshed at Danny’s knees every time she emptied it onto the incinerated bark. She had to climb weak-limbed trees to douse their upper levels, to save them, to preserve the good despite the infestation of the bad. There were rips in the denim on her legs, a silvery strawberry of gritty skin and dirt forming over her kneecap; her eye sockets looked like saturated martini olives, brackish green and bulbous from lack of rest; she was soaked in water and sweat, blisters erupting in her finger creases like tiny epidermal paunches filled with blood and acid.

The entire affair was hot and wet and visceral, like a purging or a mauling; or maybe like the afterbirth of some new terrible thing. Her heroism was her burden to bear, her injuries and burns and breakdowns her own responsibilities to shoulder. Saving Silas was a full-time job, a duty, a chore, and an effort on the far side of Herculean.

Carmilla (unbelievably and thankfully and supposedly unintentionally) eased that burden. Danny looked down from her perch, surveying the tiny black dot maneuvering from flaming site to water source, undoubtedly grumbling, but persistent in her action. Amongst her snarky protestations was a girl who just couldn’t give up the ghost of all that heroic vampire crap. Carmilla might manage to wrangle a gold star out of the affair once she and Danny drew this adventure to a close.

_If Her Surliness stayed away from those gods forsaken tree trunks._

The limbs were broken and splintered; any number of collapsing, smoking branches could impale her if Carmilla wasn’t paying close attention. Staking and immolation in one fell swoop, without a clever quip from Danny beforehand.

“We’ve got to fan out!” Danny shouted down to the assemblage of vampire and properly-abashed grounds crew. “Take the fire hose to the north side near Luscei pond and see if Tangaroa’s Pump is still functioning! You can hitch the spout up and go from there.” The grounds crew skittered away like roaches under a dislodged brick, disappearing into the smoky undergrowth.

“Carmilla!” Danny yelled on her descent.

Carmilla paused and looked heavenward with a placid nonchalance, such that it made Danny wonder just what enormity of hell the girl had been through to be as unaffected as she seemed, posing in sticky black leather and lace, surrounded by swirling flames.

“What now, Fire Engine?”

Danny maneuvered down from the tip-tops of the trees, tears surging like Victoria Falls from the smoky air. Coal-grey columns of ashy residue floated towards the sky and smothered the starlight. Danny slumped against the trunk when she finished her descent, fatigued and winded from her efforts.

Carmilla dropped her hose and lurched forward.

“Woah there, Xena,” Carmilla said, placing a hand on Danny’s shoulder. “You can’t fight fires by your lonesome. Though you’ve certainly been trying for going on 48 hours.”

“Almost done,” Danny spat thick mucus up from the depths of her lungs. It tasted of tree bark and clogged chimney flues.

“A pulmonary system turned ember and ebony won’t do you any good in the long run.”

A splintering crack rippled through the woods; it was followed by a hollow thud that sent tremors shimmying across the dank earth. Charred fern leaves drifted in the night, coruscating bits of forest no longer tethered, no longer inhibited by some scientific trifle like gravity.

“The grounds crew has the north side,” Carmilla said, stealing the magicked bucket of water from Danny’s blistered hands. “Lemme take that quadrant since you’ve successfully rescued the other three. And the southern grove. And the paddocks near the animal husbandry building, and the greenhouses.”

Danny felt rather weightless, high on adrenaline and insufficient oxygen.

“Carm, you shouldn’t,” Danny gasped.

“What, you don’t think I can handle an inferno gone rogue?”

Smoke thickened and sparked over the last remaining patch of dry shrubberies, setting one of the bushes on the near side of the clearing alight. Danny saw tortured expressions in the shadows: contorted faces, inescapable light, emaciated cheeks and jaws gone slack; a slideshow of crispy mortality, fried by cursed fire.

“Seriously, Danny,” Carmilla said, brows converging in uncharacteristic worry. “You did your bit. Let me just do the final checks. You can barely breathe.”

“’m fine,” Danny insisted, reaching for the bucket. She shook the double vision from her head and inhaled again, but the air was dirtier than smog, thicker than quicksand.

Carmilla batted her hand away and pushed her off toward the campus.

“Go find one of those oxygen tanks,” Carmilla snapped. “We got it.”

“Carm—”

“Danny, go,” Carmilla insisted, and stalked over toward the flaming bush. Like Moses without his terror… or his reverence.

“Just be sure to double back over the secure areas once you’ve established the first dry line. You can split the grounds crew into teams,” Danny instructed, leaning heavily against a smoldering trunk. She tried to stop the dry heaves threatening to overtake her respiratory system; hyperventilating was the _last_ thing she needed right now. That, and a stubborn vampire who wouldn’t fucking _listen,_ not even if a bullhorn got shoved into her ear canal.

“Carmilla, are you paying attention?!”

“Back off, Wonder Woman!” Carmilla growled, throwing buckets of water onto the cluster of shrubs.

More faces emerged in the shadows, leaving Danny to wonder if the fire was somehow enchanted; if, in its curlicuing licks of glowing chemical discharge the fire itself had somehow absorbed the final expressions of its victims and replayed them, encrusted instances on the air, like some intangible horror film projected in the lowlight.

“Just be more aware!” Danny shrieked, tearing her gaze from a roasting infant.

“Just be less annoying!” Carmilla sing-songed back at her.

The crackling sounds and burning sensations flooded Danny’s system: everything smelled of obsidian char and flaky destruction; her taste buds were seared, as if soot had infiltrated the tiny pores on her tongue; her head felt water-logged, like someone had taken a funnel and poured smoke into her ear canals; her lilac brain matter floated on a cloud of decrepit grey vapor; and her vision, bleary, yet somehow drier than the Sahara, was fixated on the listing oak curving over her cantankerous, undead ally.

The tree with the stripped leaves and the pointed, simmering limb tips was just looking for a piece of undead flesh to impale. The shadow faces saturated the oak; embossed upon the bark, the cleaver-sharp cheeks and cavernous maws and dull bronze eyes oscillated between Danny and Carmilla as the tree groaned under the added weight of burned souls. The trunk creaked, then wobbled, but Carmilla didn’t move; Danny kicked up ash and smoke as she staggered forward.

“Carm…” Danny tried, but most of her energy was funneled into running at her friend.

Her best friend. The only person on this planet who would give two fucks if she died doing her job.

The only person Danny would never be able to recover from losing.

“Carmilla, look out!” Danny hollered, but the deathly, diagonal shadow eclipsed the vampire’s reaction as Danny shouldered her out from under its falling weight.

Something pierced Danny’s lower back and her body fell slack. All the sensations bombarding her system ceased immediately. The aftertaste of iron tapped at the bottom of her esophagus like a capped geyser (pressure built-up but never released), but Danny would’ve had to have been conscious to register it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Danny would've had to have been conscious to see Carmilla rise with a swear on her lips; conscious to see that swear morph into a cry, and then a miserable bleat. Conscious to witness vampiric strength (the lifting of a two hundred year old tree trunk), and desperation (the falling and cursing and hovering over a shattered body), and panic (the sniffling and shoving and delicate jostling of a kinked spine, an impaled torso, two useless legs), and finally, _finally_ , the utterly genuine, delicate, overwhelming _care_ with which her body was transported from danger (silhouetted against the Jack-o-lantern leer of a crackling [cackling?] Silas).

“Don’t you dare to this to me, you, of all people!” Carmilla charged her comatose form. “You come back to me, or… or… I swear to God, Danny—”

Carmilla staggered as a smoky branch fell in her path; she dropped one of Danny’s mangled legs and tears from the smoke fell and mixed with the drying tracks on Danny’s cheeks.

“Danny Red-fucking-Knight Lawrence, you come back to me or… or I’ll—I’ll just have to find some way to join you!”

Carmilla kept walking, away from the danger, away from any remaining flames, any decimated souls, casting off any sense of dutiful purpose that might have been passed over upon Danny’s incapacitation. The redhead was limp as boiled spaghetti, spine contorted, a thin line of silver blood running from the corner of her lip, jean-clad legs crunched from the weight of sacrifice and tree trunk.

What was… what was the point in saving the place if the Guardian was gone?

“Don’t make me make good on that promise,” Carmilla seethed, shaking the crook of Danny’s neck in her mismatched lift. “You always knew I was a coward. So how dare you… how dare you choose this way to—to… force my hand into being the strong one? Goddammit, why did you—it should’ve been me. How… _how fucking dare you_!”

Carmilla turned back to the woods. Still living, but broken beyond belief. It would take ages to regrow, for seedlings to germinate and reform into something that had once been eerily beautiful.

Carmilla knelt and tore at the black fabric covering her torso, fashioning crude splints for legs that seemed to stretch on and on into mutilated eternity.

“Don’t make me do this without you, Danny.”

She finished wrapping the splints and swiped a silver trickle of blood from Danny’s forehead.

A hundred meters behind them: Silas wasn’t burning anymore. Merely smoking, coping, and shuddering in the aftershocks.

 

* * *

 

 

“Find Charles Birdwell!” Carmilla ordered as she burst through the doors of the infirmary. Only two beds were occupied with third-degree burn recipients, the staff, faculty, and student population having been evacuated at the onset of the blaze. The two moaning in bed were members of the damned grounds crew that started this mess in the first place, and the nurses on staff seemed to be performing only the most basic of first aid until actual burn unit paramedics could show up and remove the ailing men from their care.

“Oh dear, yes, maybe we can just get her placed in a bed—”

Carmilla rounded on the kindly older woman and clutched Danny closer.

“Did I stutter, Aunt Bee?! I know for a fact you two simpletons can’t treat the likes of injuries seen in Mayberry, so _get me the fucking warlock before I eat you alive!_ ”

And with that she deposited Danny on the bed with gentle exactitude, only to hype into super speed, fangs bared, fingers clutched around the throats of the two terrified nurses. She held them a foot off the ground; the squirming, worthless, fragile little lives were _nothing_ compared to Danny in the corner, Danny bleeding and dying even though she’s not _supposed to die_ , not as long as she stays on Silas grounds.

(“I’m not really immortal, dumbass,” Danny said after Carmilla had firmly planted her knee in Danny’s kidney. They’d started sparring for shits and giggles around decade two. Carmilla got bored on her infrequent visits, but Danny appreciated the exercise. It was getting too easy for Danny to beat the Zetas at the gym; plus, she’d been garnering peculiar looks from some of the support staff there, having been coming [and not aging] for a year or fifteen.

“You can still break my back,” Danny huffed, and twisted out from under Carmilla’s hold.

“See, now I think you’re just asking me to take it easy on you.”

“Not a chance in hell,” Danny said, rotating the vamp’s forearm behind Carmilla’s torso so that she could use her height leverage to her advantage. She wrapped one wiry arm around Carmilla’s waist and squeezed; Carmilla, not consciously, of course, might have considered it nice if her wrist hadn’t been contorted into such a degree of soreness. “But I am saying that you could kill me if you tried hard enough. Don’t pull punches, but don’t downright grind me into the ground.”

“At least not without dinner and slower music first. I don’t break out the grinding until well past eleven.”

“God, you’re insufferable.”

“Pardon, but I think you mispronounced _winner_ ,” Carmilla quipped, and dislocated her own shoulder in her escape. Pain was fleeting anyways, so she used the pop-out pop-in approach to keep the ten-foot cinnamon stick on her game. And if that meant rubbing that sharp cheek into the dirt until Carmilla couldn’t tell earth from freckles, well so be it.

“Eeerghh! Mmmmmph—‘ive,” Danny squirmed, all six feet of gawky frame faceplanted in patchy grass and a few millimeters of humiliation.

“Sorry, what was that? I couldn’t here you over the sound of my victory march.”

“—ive, oooo ‘unofa—itch!”

“Give?”

Danny nodded into the soil, mussing her cheek further.

Carmilla relented joyfully, smugness elevating an already soaring ego. Or so Danny said.

“Yes well, my ego is hardly the worst of my traits,” Carmilla smiled, and reached up to rub away the dirt from Danny’s cheek.

“Don’t I know it—uh, thanks,” Danny said, tensing under the attention.

Carmilla looked at the stain of dirt on her thumb, registered hers and Danny’s sweaty forms, their proximity, their recent entanglement, and thanked the stars that she could not pale further. Or blush. Or emit any physical sign of her discomfort.

Danny was still young. Almost forty-five, technically, but young enough that the blush rising behind the dirt resembled something like a chocolate covered cherry, or decaying organic matter over russet brick. It was not the first instance of semi-intimate physicality between them, nor would it be the last. It was the first, however, in which Carmilla’s discomfiture manifested itself so adamantly. For with that distinct breed of uneasiness came care, and with care, trouble. Apathy, she could wrap around her undead shoulders like a home-made quilt of disillusioned safety. But passion, heated loathing or desirous affection, they both stemmed from _care_. She could not fall in care with another one, especially one who just recounted the limits of her own mortality.

Carmilla really couldn’t handle another loss like Laura.

“Easy there, Gingersnap,” Carmilla dissolved whatever tension built, not sexual, but certainly tender. “I can’t have people on this campus thinking I hang out with garden trolls addicted to steroid injections.”

“Because you have such a squeaky-clean reputation to uphold?” Danny countered. “Literally, you grew up without indoor plumbing, and some of your hygiene habits have rolled over to this century.”

And the conversation, the intimacy, the camaraderie, the shared _something_ devolved into verbal jabs that masked deeper feeling, as it would for years and years to come.)

She returned from her highjacked memories when she felt the cartilage from the nurses' throats grind beneath her fingers.

“Fetch the warlock,” Carmilla commanded the nurses, pupils blown to predatory proportions. “Charles Birdwell. Chuck. The old guy who runs the bookstore. Don’t come back without him,” Carmilla bared her fangs, hissed at the two women (one younger, one older, with stories and families and hopes and dreams but none of it _mattered_ if they couldn’t do this one simple thing for her). “If you fail, I will rip your esophagi out through your nostrils, run them through a blender, and force the pair of you to ingest your own throats without throats. Do I make myself clear?”

They nodded and spasmed and Carmilla dropped them to the floor. The older collapsed but the younger nurse helped her recover, and they exited the apothecary—infirmary, in a flurry of aqua scrubs and likely soiled undergarments.

Danny’s chest rose and fell in labored waves, a rattling, loose, metallic-sounding echo pulsing from her folded-in thoracic cavity. Carmilla couldn’t watch her, couldn’t touch her, but her mind was flying around the confines of the infirmary. Syringes and intravenous lines, pills of varying chemical arrangements and potencies, herbs of questionable origin, bandages and salves and CCs and injections and and and and and. She’d never needed treatment so she didn’t know what to _do_ with it all, didn’t know how to help, and it was taking all of her will power not to throw open the refrigerator and drain the supplies dry (should Danny require a transfusion). (Looking back, she’d sneer at her ineptitude. Danny couldn’t very well have O+ or AB pumped into her system, not when her system was the unique byproduct of a curse and blood sacrifice.)

But Carmilla couldn’t fault her failing mental faculties because she was high, high on wrath and disgust and the faltering system of _justice_ , but she wouldn’t leave Danny. She needed to feed, but she wouldn’t leave Danny.

The burn victims groaned in their beds, and the switch flipped.

It’d been a while since she’d feasted on human bar-b-que.

Later, when the nurses returned with the warlock and the paramedics arrived with the burn kits, Carmilla was rocking Danny’s body manically; blood dribbled from the creases of her mouth, like an elderly soul who had lost control of their bodily functions. Spit mixed with tears mixed with erythrocyte sludges on her chin, and Carmilla couldn’t bring herself to care about the two charred, drained bodies of the very dead grounds crew sprawled across the floor. She didn’t even flinch when one of the nurses crunched a finger and squealed. Didn’t pull back when Chuck stood over Danny’s body and mumbled swears in an ancient tongue. The curses floated on the periphery of her conscious mind, but _hopeless_ and _irreversible_ weren’t terms she felt like reconciling at present.

“Help her,” Carmilla charged.

_Help me_.

“Hold her hips,” Chuck instructed, which Carmilla did.

“What are you doing?” Carmilla asked.

Chuck placed a sanitary towel (green, Carmilla remembered, because it made Danny look like the flaming forest of fir trees) between Danny’s teeth.

“Helping her,” Chuck said. “We don’t want her to bite through her own tongue.” He shifted to the head of the bed and speared his fingers into Danny’s armpits. “Are you holding her?”

Carmilla nodded and squished her own fingers into Danny’s hips so hard it was sure to bruise.

Chuck yanked with the strength of a bull elephant. There were two sickening _clacks_ and Danny opened her eyes, choked, bit down on the green rag, and screamed until her throat was raw. She cried, and whimpered, and thrashed, and then cried from the crashing. Shock consumed her, and the first seizure began.

After the calm, the hallucinations emerged (LaFKirschPerryElsieKirschMoniqueLauraLauraLauraLauraLaura) , and the pitiful, scratchy, plaintive “ _Daddy?_ ” that the Gingersnap released nearly broke Carmilla anew. The vampire stayed with the guardian and screamed in silence, praying, begging those blessed stars to save her best friend and take her blackened soul instead.

 

* * *

 

“What do you mean paralyzed?” Carmilla asked, confounded. “You’re a warlock. _Fix her_ ,” she hissed.

“Countess, human anatomy is complex in its own right, but blood curses only complicate treatments further.”

“You can’t perform your hoo-doo because she went and made herself immortal?” Carmilla asked.

Her adrenaline had plateaued in the aftermath of Danny’s initial treatment. Intravenous lines ran in haphazard zig-zags from Danny’s pale form, shoved into various orifices and then fleeing, like peasants from an ogre or a lycan, underneath blankets or around slick metal poles or into beeping holographic machines and accordianesque ventilation pumps. Carmilla hadn’t left the bedside since stumbling through the doors with Danny in her arms. Silas could be blown apart or burned to oblivion and Carmilla would give zero fucks, as long as the warlock that called the bookshop home had some _answer_ for her that didn’t point toward hopelessness.

“She’s still human,” Chuck replied sagely.

“Then treat her as you would a human.”

“But she’s not—her body, it’s human. Her soul, her… essence, it’s, well, it’s other.”

“Speak plainly, Charles,” Carmilla instructed, falling back into her older tongue. It was habitual, the sliding of dialect, especially when conversing with someone from the old country. The large kindly man, with eyes the color of Styrian mud and skin a lighter shade of espresso, had inhabited the bookshop of the Silas campus since before Carmilla’s arrival so many centuries prior.

“A recovery,” Carmilla continued, casting a forlorn glance toward Danny’s delicate body, “certainly it’s still possible? With her mettle? Her courage? Physical handicaps are but mental hurdles, are they not?”

“Mircalla, you above all should know that those mental hurdles you dismiss so carelessly can be the most difficult to circumvent.”

…

…

…

“You forget your station, Warlock.”

“My sincerest apologies, Countess,” Chuck replied deferentially. “But you must acknowledge that slips are bound to occur, especially with fickle supernatural natures. Those two men from the grounds crew—”

“—were halfway to hell already,” Carmilla sneered. “I performed a mercy.”

“With her vitality, paralysis will hit her much harder.”

“So we’ll work on recuperation.”

“We?” Chuck replied knowingly. “You intend to see her through this?”

A beat, in which Carmilla considered admitting more than was proper. But stoicism or pride won out in the end, resulting in nothing more than an almost-confession.

“Leave us,” Carmilla bade, turning her back on the sorcerer.

“Mir—Countess,” Chuck called, but Carmilla didn’t respond. She stood, smooth and implacable as granite, at Danny’s bedside.

“I’ve administered all of the medications on hand that will dampen the pain. You understand that our methods are limited because she is not able to leave the grounds.”

No response from Carmilla.

“I’ll return with herbs from my own stores, if you wish,” Chuck offered, shuffling toward the window.

He popped the lock and pushed the frame upwards; golden dawn poured into the room and landed on Danny’s face, derisive and scornful in its cheeriness. Lacerations and scratches cut superficially across classic cheekbones; sunbeams highlighted the faint discoloration running the length of her nose from a war waged long ago. Danny was bewitching, glamorous with her warrior’s scars, awash in sunlight.

Amazon. Valkyrie. Boudica reincarnated. Joan of Arc. Xena.

Danny Lawrence.

The bones began shifting in Chuck’s skeleton; Carmilla could hear them pop, the sinews unravel, the tendons knitted together teased apart by magical manipulation.

“Charles,” Carmilla called softly. “She will be fine for—for now?”

“Yes,” Chuck intoned mid-shift. His eyes were beadier, his stance more stooped. “The drugs will suffice for several hours.”

“Then allow me the day with her?” Carmilla asked uncertainly. “Grant me a… mourning period. A few hours, I implore you.”

“Countess…” Chuck admonished. “She’s not gone.”

“I understand that… but…” Carmilla finally moved, ran a shaking index finger over a mottled wrist, ugly and warped against a baby blue blanket. “It will take so long to bring her back from… from where she thinks she is.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Perhaps,” Carmilla repeated, then shook her head. “Return at sunset.”

“Yes, Countess.”

“And thank you.”

“You’re most welcome, Countess.”

Chuck pirouetted at the window and grunted, sprouted, shrunk, and flapped about gracelessly, until he caught himself in the trough of the dive. The raven turned into a floundering speck as it raced across the campus skies, but the vampire paid no heed to the retreating shifter.

With uncharacteristic mildness, she stripped herself of her smoke-scented clothing and unlatched the railing at Danny’s bedside. Mircalla climbed aboard and huddled into nothingness beside Danny’s hip, scared to touch, but more frightened not to; not to feel Danny, her stunningly righteous humanity, the sliver that was left.

Mircalla needed to grieve for her friend. An overwrought Countess, eighteen years old and fragmented, incomplete, traced nonsensical patterns over the lumpy mass that once constituted an abdomen.

“Please,” she begged the stars, hiding behind that pompous dawn. “Please don’t let this break her.”

_Please don’t break me again_.

Mircalla dozed at Danny’s side, lulled to restless sleep by heart monitors and heartbeats.

 

* * *

 

Carmilla awoke at the end of the day, prepared for brutality.

 

* * *

 

Danny awoke three weeks later, unprepared for… just, unprepared.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My outline didn't account for my penchant for heaping loads of sadness upon them before they see brighter days. Feedback appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This ain't over, no not here, not while I still need you around / You don't owe me, we might change / Yeah we just might feel good.
> 
> Carmilla's a coward and even Danny isn't brave enough. Not to stay living.

Danny held her upper lip stiffly longer than anyone in her right mind should have. Carmilla was out, probably draining some poor soul (if her escalating mood of dour hostility was anything to go by). For the umpteenth time did Danny strain, clenching her obliques and her abdominals and thinking _maybe, maybe this time_ à la Sally Bowles, that the whole situation was nothing more than an endless night terror from which she would stir, laugh, and then move on from as a fully functional, mobile, damned capable _person,_ as opposed to this hulking toddler that she had become.

_That she'd been reduced to_ , she thought grimly.

(“Don’t overdo it,” the guy, Chuck, from the bookstore, had directed her. His knowledge of medicine was questionable at best, but he was there half the time, congenial at her bedside. Accompanying Carmilla.

Always Carmilla.

“You’ll have to work your way up to it. Your… _condition_ ,” Chuck continued cryptically, so that the students behind the rolling curtains remained clueless. “—it doesn’t make you invincible, or prone to healing any faster.”

“So, no Wolverine, then?”

“Lycan blood could be used as a catalyzing substance, though how it would react with the composition in a blood sacrifice—”

“She was joking, old man,” Carmilla cut.

Danny offered an amiable smile to temper Carmilla’s aggression. “It’s cool, Chuck. Thanks for all your help with this. I know it’s not exactly in your job description.”

“My pleasure, Miss Lawrence,” Chuck said.

And Danny couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if the man hunched swiftly, dipped his head, almost _bowed_ to Carmilla before his exit.)

Flashforward to her bed, her prison, and in all that alone time, Danny pondered the similar spellings of confine and coffin; wondered if this was some recompense for an ill-judged rescue attempt or saving stunt that had rippling affects of which she was unawares.

The universe was exacting retribution.

Because how could anyone deserve _this_? Imprisoned within their own body and helpless, drowning in a chronic stasis. No light, no light at the end of the tunnel, and constantly harangued by some undead gypsy and her pet crow.

Danny wasn’t a savior any more. Just a burden on the place she had charged herself with protecting. Now she exhausted their medical supplies, supplies needed by actual _students_ , not her saggy, incurable frame. She could move her torso, swing her arms, shift in her bed, catalog the drugs and the dosages and reach (if she wanted to) and inject an air embolism to end it all. Or maybe too much morphine? Would that kill her, for good this time?

She could alleviate Silas of its burdensome, useless guardian, and let someone else step up to the plate.

Danny was both brave and idiotic enough to form a plan.

The night before her first rehab session, Danny slipped the hypodermic needle and the plunging syringe our from under the covers. The night staff (singular, one intern) made rounds every two hours, and this less-than-attentive individual wouldn’t be back for an additional fifteen minutes tacked onto the usual check-in time. Danny had made note that the attendant possessed yellowing nails and nicotine breath and a penchant for lateness on routine check-ups. She could count on those cigarettes to give her more time for plan B, should plan A end in disaster.

Danny pushed herself up and fought the throbbing ache at the base of her spine, the roiling tenderness of her coccyx. So much sitting on her tailbone and she was sore constantly, angry perpetually, and disgusted continually.

_Can’t even fucking sit like a normal person_.

Two parts cerulean tinted silver and one part generic digital green, her curtained cubicle radiated a restless potential, the type of bound energy that Danny possessed on especially rainy days, cooped up for too long and left with little to do. She could almost feel relief, savage in its intensity, helping both herself and Silas in the process.

Danny stared at the thickness of the needle, about a fifth as round as her pinky (definitely wide enough, long enough, especially if she went for the jugular). She’d have to push that plunger all the way down to get a large enough air pocket to race toward her heart, into her lungs. It’d been two hundred and fifty years since she’d taken her physiology courses, but she felt she could recall the basics well enough to commit a neat suicide.

_Best get on with it_.

“What frilly hell has corroded your brain tissue, Gingersnap?”

Danny sighed, syringe held aloft at her trachea. Her grip loosened and her body unwound, but her mind, her soul, ratcheted back up into a tense ball of fury.

Because there she was, _of-fucking-course_ , the vampire, Danny’s personal indemnification and glorified baby-sitter.

Danny flopped back onto the rocks that Silas called pillows and stared out the window.

“What do you want, Carm?”

“Maybe one less dead body in the world.”

“Funny, dead bodies don’t usually seem to bother you,” Danny focused on the _drip drip_ of her IV line. “How’s the lawsuit with the grounds crew union going?”

“Peachy, Ginger,” Carmilla’s voice was a velvet rumble. “I didn’t really break any laws. Good luck to them, trying to find any records of my existence to charge me.”

“Just, you know, you broke laws of humanity. Benchmarks of morality, murder, ethics and the like.”

Carmilla tutted her displeasure. “I’m not human, Red Vine.”

“Hold yourself to a higher standard! Fucking hell, Carmilla,” Danny stage-whispered, weeping because _why the hell not?_ Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she’d saved someone who’d turned around and murdered two men in agony. Danny wondered what testament that was to her own character, the fact that (knowing Carmilla would still plunge fatal fangs into the necks of the grounds crew) Danny would do it all over again.

She’d save Carmilla in a heartbeat.

Danny sobbed.

“You’re one to talk, Suicidal Sally,” Carmilla mumbled.

Danny swiped furiously at her tears but she couldn’t stop leaking, like a pipe with one too many washers loose.

“What the fuck do you know about it?” Danny spat, moist and gurgly.

“Sssshh!!” Behind the curtain, the nurse at his station stirred. “Is everything okay back—”

“Back off, Doogie Howser,” Carmilla snapped, sending the single staff member scurrying.

Danny shoved the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, hoped the blistered, callous skin on her palms could absorb the tears streaming down her face; and maybe those tears could renew her hands, like some sort of self-produced, reinvigorating lotion paste. Fountain-of-youth and eraser-of-damage and baptismal font in partially immortal ( _cripple, invalid, burden, useless_ ) precipitation.

Danny opened her eyes and her vision was still blurry, her hands were still disfigured, and her legs were still paralyzed.

She heard the chair scratch the floor on her left, the tramping clunk of combat boots at her bedside.

Danny wouldn’t look that way. She didn’t blame Carmilla for it all; Danny had _saved_ her, but right now Danny just couldn’t fucking _look_ at her. Meeting Carmilla iris to iris was a fight she could never win, because that face had seen centuries pass and every emotion she ever felt (angerpainelationcompassion **PITY** dispossessionterrorindignationcomaraderielove?affection **LOVE** ) was reflected tenfold in the dead stare aimed back at her; and honestly, in her petrification, in this bleak circumstance where she couldn’t outrun the lo—emotions… Danny couldn’t cope with it.

“I tried it, a few times, you know,” Carmilla’s voice felt like an uncomfortable stirring, a spatula working out lumps in clotted dough.

Danny kept her eyes on the moon. She wondered if she’d meet Diana in an afterlife once she killed herself. Danny would walk over the tails of meteors, like an over-the-rainbow sort of thing but with a twist, over the starlight, dipping into moonshade and emerging in an enchanted land where she knew darkness, yes, but the moon, her fattening and thinning spotlight, always illuminated the wooded paths. With her silver blood and her bow slung across her back and the wind gusting against her face as she ran like the demigoddess she pretended to be; Danny could run, run, and never stop running.

The rush ( _exhilaration, power, freedom_ ) of running ( _needles in her chest and jaw hanging slack and eyes watering bullets and divine,_ _invincible escape_ ).

Danny crashed back down to earth when her lower back twinged; she broke her gaze from the moon glow and gagged at the sight of her mangled legs.

“The coffin was wooden,” Carmilla ground out, passing Danny a muted pink cup complete with humiliating bendy straw. “Enchanted probably, nailed down in silver, shape of a cross burned into the lid, the whole bit,” Carmilla continued. Danny slurped. “But I wrenched a decent chunk out of the side of it, had enough space to turn my shoulders, enough room to hold that wood up to my chest. I could’ve done it.”

“…but you didn’t,” Danny managed weakly, setting the cup aside.

“No,” Carmilla said, toneless. “Too much of a coward, I guess. I’m no Uma Thurman.”

Danny clenched her jaw. Her tailbone ached and her mouth was fuzzy as a cotton boll despite the water.

“Come on, Xena, you love that movie,” Carmilla snarked, though not unkindly. “In the coffin, punching the world away.”

“Shut up.”

Carmilla had the fucking gall to lower the railing, perch on the bedside.

_Don’t look at her, don’t look at her, don’t look—_

“I don’t care if we talk,” the vampire started.

“Good.”

“But I need for you to stop clutching that needle like a security blanket, Linus.”

“Peppermint Patty, you asshole.”

“See, that’s the Danny Lawrence I love to hate. Like she’s got something to prove,” Carmilla murmured again, and Danny felt pressure at her wrist.

Not warmth. Not chill. Just a presence. Sensations were still muddled, but the _thereness_ , the indisputable tangibility of fingers on her arm stirred something inside of her that Danny had long suppressed: that piece of herself Danny thought had been crushed along with her mortality. But no, it was there, brought to light under Carmilla’s hesitant probing. The sensation was sickening and childish and futile and it made her want to vomit.

It hit Danny like a MAC truck, the realization that her infallibility was not, in fact, infallible. That this contract she’d signed in blood hundreds of years ago had serious stipulations, clauses and addendums tacked on in subparagraphs that _weakened_ her significantly. That Carmilla, creatures like her, They were the Real Divine.

Danny was just… second best. Impressive, definitely, but never first choice.

_less than_

Like _Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2_.

Chapter titled: “The Inchoation of Weakness.”

Danny yanked her hand out from underneath Carmilla’s, grasped the needle tightly and tried to roll to her side.

“Danny!”

“Stop it!” Danny thrashed as best she could, brandishing the needle like a broadsword. Because that’s what it was to her, that tiny, prickly syringe. Her last action, her final means of performing, of _doing_ something without being waited upon and wiped up and coddled for the succeeding months, gods, _years_ , if it came down to it.

Danny Lawrence would go out with a weapon in her hand.

Just fucking watch.

“Danny, stop being childish,” Carmilla admonished. The tone was motherly, soft, out of sorts with Carmilla’s perpetual brand of condescending disdain. Her words didn’t sit well with Danny’s auditory sense. Perhaps it was a side effect of the thrashing, the warbled disorientation of her inner ear, her upset equilibrium.

“Oh my god, could you just let me go!? I was supposed to go!” Danny tried to shriek at her (at this imitation Carmilla, all caring and cajoling, squishy as yogurt), but her throat was hoarse. Almost like Danny had been living on IVs and gross hospital jello cups for two months.

_Oh wait!_

FUCK. Fuckity fucking fuck this.

“Danny—”

“I should’ve died!” Danny sobbed and twisted, pulled electronic leads from her chest, a strange monitoring contraption from her ring finger.

Her brain felt like a watermelon dropped from the top of a football stadium. Sticky. Splattered. A wet stain on the concrete.

“Danny, you’ve got to stop moving—”

“Don’t you see! If I do that _I will die_ ,” Danny gasped. Her hand found her hair and she tugged at it, nails digging into her scalp out of some habitual self-comforting mechanism. “I can’t stop moving. If I can’t move, that’s it for me. Don’t make me stay here. Don’t trap me here, please. Let me go on my own terms. I can’t—I can’t live like this!”

Danny canted her hips upward and cried out, elbow drilling into the base of the mattress, neck supporting her body in some circuitous dance of delirium. She was in pain or on too many pain meds or just soulfully pained, because she wanted movement and freedom and this impairment had to _end_. Danny Lawrence wasn’t strong enough.

Carmilla, on the other hand… Carmilla wasn’t brave enough to kill herself.

The redhead chuckled dementedly at her mini-revelation, because Danny definitely wasn’t brave enough to live.

Something heavy covered her and Danny quit flailing. A loadstone pressed upon her hips, manacles clapped her wrists above her head, and ravishing porcelain flooded her vision. Moondust filtered through black lace.

Carmilla’s skin.

“Danny, calm down,” Carmilla spoke over her.

Danny hiccupped and her diaphragm flopped painfully, a floating Frisbee crashing into brick. Carmilla, the iron maiden, pressed her body over Danny’s, putting an end to her tempestuous spasms. The immobility was so perplexing, not because of paralysis, but because of Carmilla straddling her, holding her, trying to get her attention, working to pluck the needle from her grasp.

_I’m onto you, Elvira._

“I’m here, you know that, right?”

“Kinda hard to deny it when you’re straddling me in bed,” Danny gritted through clenched teeth.

“Oh now, the things I could do to you, _really_ straddling you in bed,” Carmilla purred in a good-natured tease, but there was no substance in the threat.

“Shit,” Danny said weakly. “I wouldn’t even be able to enjoy it because I can’t feel anything below the hips. Good try, though.”

Carmilla huffed above her.

“Nothing is severed. Pinched, maybe. You’re broken, but you’ll heal. The MRIs—”

“—are inconclusive.”

“Are hogwash. Charles believes in your spirit, that you possess the resiliency to manage physical therapy. Your body is…” Carmilla trailed off and shifted, ran a hand down the side of Danny’s torso. It felt like a water jet on the concave of her healing waist, refreshing and stimulating.

But the sensations petered out into tingles, then twinges, insubstantial ghostings because:

_Come on moron, I can’t feel anything below the belt._

Something tickled Danny’s naval, like a feather burrowing into her belly-button, right on the precipice of sensation and loss.

“I’d make sure you enjoyed it, that you felt s _omething_ ,” Carmilla promised.

A stealthy finger climbed Danny’s naval and tapped against her ribcage. Danny rolled her eyes and flexed her arms to little avail. Carmilla’s hold was secure.

“Why do you have to turn all of the heavy stuff sexual?” Danny tried. “Is that why you’re so fucked up in the head?”

Carmilla scrunched her brows together and released Danny’s wrists. She’d successfully wrangled the needle away from the bedridden woman, so Carmilla sat back on Danny’s useless hips, scrutinizing the cripple in the gauzy moonlight.

“Maybe,” Carmilla admitted with surprising candor. “Coping mechanism, I’m sure. For what, I don’t know. Trauma? Abuse?” she shrugged a sloping shoulder, a perfectly curved hillock of epidermis the color of Styrian snow. “Maybe I just want to take your mind off things.”

In her pained desperation, Danny wondered what it would be like to kiss that shoulder. Wondered if sex was, in some pseudo-psychoanalysis of her corrupted world, a form of death like all the critics argued. Maybe Carmilla could send her off with a bang (literal, figurative), whimpering all the while.

Maybe Carmilla could kill her.

“You could do it, you know,” Danny whispered to her.

Carmilla bent back over her, restrained her, brushed hair from her face. Gorgeous and perverse, like an angelic rapist.

“What?” Carmilla purred, leered, stroked. “What do you want me to do?”

Danny knew Carmilla well enough to recognize the ploy. She felt like she was replaying a record from ages and ages ago, cyclical gyres and a patterned series of events, the pair of them, doomed to repeat until something broke. Carmilla’s sultry seduction. Danny’s wish to forget feeling. To stop hurting.

_Remarkably few variables change._

It’s disingenuous.

Mere distraction.

So Danny got really fucking _pissed_ , because Carmilla did this to people who didn’t _mean_ anything to her. Used sex as a throwaway, never on the people she cared about. It pissed Danny off further, enraged her, because when did she _become_ something to Carmilla? When did she morph from dispassionate antagonist to occasional acquaintance to shots-sharing best friend to pseudo-roommate to _giving her life up for the woman currently dry-humping her in a remote-operated hospital bed_?

“I was going to say kill me. You could just kill me,” Danny turned her face from Carmilla’s hovering lips, shut her eyes against an unwanted advance. “Please get off of me.”

“Will you promise not to hurt yourself?” Carmilla murmured.

Danny could feel humid breath dribbling over her ear lobe like blood from a head wound.

“No,” she protested.

“Then I’m not leaving you,” Carmilla nuzzled into the side of her neck, flicked the tip of her tongue against the jugular Danny had nearly hacked away at with a needle.

“Then can you stop—stop try—hah… stop trying to k-kiss me?”

Carmilla froze over her shoulder, picked her head up slightly. “I thought…”

Danny finally found the courage to look upward, to face Venus incarnate, stars-on-earth, her undeniable attraction. The influence was overwhelming; Danny rose and fell at Carmilla’s command.

“I thought I was helping…” Carmilla murmured, concentration lost in the faded wear of Danny’s hospital gown. “… helping you forget. I didn’t mean to force…”

Carmilla catapulted backward, hands releasing Danny’s wrists quick as a blink.

“Gingersnap, that’s the last thing I intended.”

“You thought fucking the gimp would _help_?” Danny asked, disbelief (and a little disgust) shooting her voice an octave higher than normal. Because… just who else had Carmilla _helped_ during all her years on this earth? And did… did they even really need helping? Or did they just need—

“I thought it would make you forget for a while.”

“Shit,” Danny’s eyes spurted salt water.

_Where the hell were all of these tears coming from?_

Didn’t her stats say she’d been dehydrated for going on three days?

_Maybe from all of the sobbing._

“Please don’t turn me into… into another…”

“I’m not going to bite you,” Carmilla promised, toying with her fingers in her lap. The black paint on her nails had chipped away, the colored layers uneven and jagged. “I’d kill you before I turned you.”

“No, not… not a vampire,” Danny pursed her lips, huffed through her nose with such force she felt the snot clinging to the interior of her nostrils. “That’s not what I’m saying.

“What else could I turn you into?”

Danny searched Carmilla’s eyes for comprehension. Surely she understood? Splayed out below the vampire like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard, Danny couldn’t believe she was the one who had to _explain_. Couldn’t Carmilla see? See every schism, every insecurity Danny harbored, laid out on this cage of a bed, this autopsy table, this strange alter where they were finally, _finally_ , coming to terms with the fact that Danny had expected to _die_ for Carmilla?

“I don’t want to be another one of your coping mechanisms,” Danny said.

Carmilla’s lips parted instantly, a regurgitated rebuttal itching for release. But Danny watched as Carmilla caught herself; saw the erection of the proverbial caution tape, the barricades demarcating the edges of the safe zone from the infected area, the off-limits topic, the _don’t go there_ space.

“Carmilla, you’re my best friend,” Danny said. She placed a hand, weighted with ID tags and medical tape, upon Carmilla’s kneecap. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I…” Carmilla studied the hand on her leg. In the pasty light from the moon and the blipping digital screens she looked every bit of eighteen, fragile as a China doll and stable as a Jenga tower.

“You fuck your best friend and… things change,” Danny explained. “You’re drunk, and you make a bad decision, and you laugh it off and stay friends. Or it gets weird, because that’s your _best friend_ , and you don’t know how to act like you did before, because, I mean, if you did it right, then it… I mean, it would mean something. At least to me.”

“Would it?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I’d sure as hell want to remember it. I wouldn’t want it to be something to help me forget that I’m—”

“Suicidal.”

“—sad. Depressed, if we have to label it specifically. I’d want it to… to mean something for you, too. I thought… I thought I meant something to you,” Danny finished, feeling lame on multiple levels.

“What?” Carmilla balked. Danny could feel the tightness of Carmilla’s quads below her fingertips. The vampire’s entire body tensed into a coil of jungle cat potential, ready to strike out should anything attempt an attack.

And maybe that’s what Carmilla expected, because she was that twisted. An attack, at two a.m., from a cripple in a hospital bed.

“I… I was going to die for you,” Danny said.

“I… what?”

“Carm, don’t be thick.”

“I’m… no, really, I’m missing something here.”

“And that decides which of us retained their humanity,” Danny shrugged, baffled by Carmilla’s inability to comprehend; baffled by her damage, so acute and penetrating, that Carmilla couldn’t fathom that Danny might just _feel_ something for her. At least enough something to not want to see the vampire well and truly dead.

Danny tapped Carmilla’s knee with her fingers.

“Can you dismount, Karnstein?”

Carmilla hobbled off of Danny’s hips and resituated herself on the side of the mattress. One leg fell off the edge, tangled up in that powder blue excuse for a blanket. Her face was squinched and puckered, like a baby sucking a lemon for the first time. Distasteful, yes, and completely perplexed as to what was unfolding before her.

“Carmilla,” Danny said soberly, pulling herself upright so that she peered down, just a few inches, at the Nightwalker. It wasn’t much, but it was an advantage she’d grown accustomed to, and she needed every advantage stockpiled in her dwindling arsenal. Danny’s control was returning; her unraveling sanity restitched with the onerous task of explaining _feelings_ , legitimate human sentiment to Carmilla.

“I don’t want you to treat me like… like I’m nothing to you. Can you just… can’t you just damn your pride this one time and acknowledge that I’m your friend? That I deserve something more than what you give to… what did you say, all those years ago? ‘I don’t feel anything when I’m screwing some starry-eyed cupcake.’ I mean, I can’t walk, but I deserve better than that shit. I tried to _save_ you, Carm. We…we’ve been at this for centuries, the two of us. I’d go down under that tree again for you if I had to. I’d want it to kill me, instead of sucking me in this mire-shit, but hey, I’d still—”

“Stop,” Carmilla lifted a hand, every inch aristocratic Countess of bum-fuck Styrian wilderness with that titanic voice and silk-smooth palm. “Are you saying you… you have feelings for me?”

“W-what?” Danny stammered, thrown for six, because that wasn’t quite the message she was attempting to convey. But then it registered, Carmilla’s polarized notions of love. Because there was manipulative love, the Dean, with Carmilla as her glass marionette. The Dean had loved Carmilla in her own depraved, wicked sense, loved enough to limit and control and disguise it as care in the meantime. And then Laura, blessed Laura, who had sacrificed everything because she was _in love with_ Carmilla, in love and prepared to die in a starburst of hungry light, in supernatural, nuclear fission impossible to scale.

And Danny had been prepared to die for Carmilla. If she’d succeeded this night, Danny would have, effectively, _died for Carmilla_.

But Danny wasn’t in love…? … no. Certainly not.

“I love you,” Danny blurted, and then her eyes bugged to animated proportions, pupils dilating at the undoubtedly misconstrued sense of her confession.

“I—”

“Not like, I love you,” Danny said. “But… as in, let’s take it back to early 21st century courtship rituals. Not, ‘I like you, like you’, I just like you. But in this case, I love you, but I’m not, like, _in love_ with you… but… you, I… I love you enough to not want you dead, okay?”

Danny rambled, because it’d been swirling in her mind for so long, why she’d run, why she’d pushed, kept pushing, had been pushing Carmilla from day one to get off her ass and contribute, pushed her to feel something, expel something, offer something _constructive_ during her endless years on this space rock.

Why had she pushed Carmilla out of the way as a tree crushed her legs?

“I love you enough to try to save you, every time, mainly from yourself,” Danny kept going. “‘Cause honestly, Carm, nothing in this world is going to kill you. You’re gonna do it to yourself one day, when you get brave enough or sad enough or desperate enough, and I’d hate it if you went out not knowing you meant something, something real, love, but not—well, definitely affection. Or… love, sure, why not? Hell, you just mean something to me, alright?”

Carmilla inhaled deeply and her brows converged into a skinny black millipede. She cocked her head sideways, looked at her hands and then… reared back and slapped Danny clear across the face.

“How dare you,” Carmilla seethed, pushing off from the mattress.

Danny opened her mouth, rolled her jaw about and winced, because damn, that hurt like a motherfucker.

“Not gonna lie, I thought I’d at least get an awkward pat on the back after that,” Danny said, eyes flitting to Carmilla’s livid frame. “Although, I really don’t know why I’m surprised.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh my god,” Danny puffed a disgruntled breath, her oily hair flapping heavily against her shoulder. “You tried to do that all of five seconds ago!”

“You can’t… you’re not… I can’t even blame it on you being human, because you’re _not_. You’re just Danny fucking Lawrence who can’t see past her own blind agenda of self-sacrificing, bull-shitted righteousness!”

“What the—”

“You care for me, Red Knight? Am I your damsel now? Forget fucking and passion and that side of the bill, but how the _hell_ do you think I’d make it without you around, huh? You keep talking about my woes and troubles when you’re the one who just tried to off yourself! You haven’t learned _anything_. And you think that I don’t even… you think I don’t care for you?”

Carmilla crushed the syringe in her grip and shoved her hands under her armpits, as if to restrain herself from reaching out and choking Danny. She curled inwards, retreated into her shell of a torso, a black box turtle afraid of exposing too much skin, too much heart.

“You would’ve been content to die, thinking I hold you in such base regard?” Carmilla spoke to the floor. There seemed to be less judgment lurking there. “Danny, there’d be no reason, no point without you.”

The admittance lingered like perfume. Saccharine at first, oppressive and sticky, like the words had been aimed at the hollow of Danny’s throat, the interior of her wrist, and they fell there, slept there, weighted drops of scented sentiment shot at her in a concentrated spray. They elicited memories and connections between past actions and present confessions and _oh_. Oh god, and the odor dissipated on the air but traces of it remained, a sense memory, burned in Danny’s nostrils and her brain; impossible to forget.

_Carmilla… loves me?_

“I didn’t know,” Danny started, retracted, tried again. “I didn’t think—”

“No. You didn’t. You’re so busy trying to take care of everyone else that you don’t realize…” Carmilla’s fangs slipped over her lower lip; the dark lace trembled over her chest as she shuffled anxiously.

“Just know that everything you said to me applies to yourself, okay? We’re on this torture cruise together, because, hmmhmh, apparently a sadist runs the cosmos. So yeah, Danny, I care about you, too,” Carmilla sucked in a frenzied breath, as if that confession had been equivalent to extensive water boarding sessions.

“So how the fuck do you think I would feel walking in on my best friend’s body after she’d committed suicide?” Carmilla charged, rounding on Danny. “And all because of injuries sustained after she tried to save _me_?”

Carmilla growled, then threw the syringe she’d been holding into the floor. The projectile hit the ground with such unadulterated force that it chipped the tile, the needle ricocheting off the ground like a hunk of shrapnel.

Shots fired. Bombs dropped.

Take cover.

“You ever wanted to kill me, Lawrence?” Carmilla mumbled wetly, brown eyes shining like chocolate diamonds. “That would damn sure do the trick.”

…

…

…

“I’m sorry,” Danny whispered, and she was. She was sorry about a lot of things.

“Ditto,” Carmilla replied, staring at the broken syringe.

“Can I… can I ask you a favor?”

“If it’s anything Kevorkian in nature, I might take it upon myself to toss you from the window.”

“We’re on the first floor. How much more damage do you expect to do?” Danny chuckled, gurgled, and it didn’t feel good, but… it was okay.

“Can we call a truce, or something?” Danny asked.

“A truce?”

“Just… all this emotional shit,” Danny tried to explain, though the notion was difficult to express in words. “Lots of blame and misunderstandings and just… I don’t know. I feel fourteen all over again.”

“You don’t look a day over twenty-three,” Carmilla deadpanned.

“I just want to ask you something and not get laughed at. It’s just… it’s hard for me, okay?”

“I won’t laugh at you. Not now,” Carmilla promised. And something in Carm’s deferential timbre (the assurance that Carmilla loved her, in a companionable, unhealthy, toxic way) made Danny believe her.

“I start physical therapy tomorrow,” Danny said.

“Yes.”

“Would you… would you be with me, for that? Not all the time, just… pop in through the process? There’s electrode stimulation and muscle exercises, and then Chuck wants to do these spells—”

“Stakes and silver couldn’t keep me away, Gingersnap.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Carm?”

“Hmm?”

“Just, uh…” Danny hefted her torso to the extreme left side of the hospital bed. She used her arms to forcibly tug her legs toward the edge, wincing at the pinches in the tops of her thighs. And then stopping, because that was definitely a _pinch_ , which was definitely sensation, which meant that if she could hurt then she could feel… or maybe she was just imagining things?

Like inviting Carmilla to bed. That only happened in her nightmares, right? And that one hella strange dream from decade fourteen when she’d gotten high on the dirkweed Carmilla brought back from the poltergeist university in Antwerp.

Danny smirked inwardly and tried not to stew over the offer. She rearranged the covers and inclined her head, didn’t make eye contact. The proposal was there.

Ball in the Court of the Undead.

The mattress dipped and Danny grinned, outwardly this time, tight-lipped and sincere. She turned on her side and lay looking at Carmilla.

“I suppose it would be poor form to whip out my plethora of Lieutenant Dan jokes,” Carmilla cracked.

And Danny, for want of any more tears to cry, giggled.

“Quite poor. Though the ‘run, Lawrence, run!’, during that attack from the Sphinx? Pretty good.”

“Yes, well, I knew even you would appreciate that one,” Carmilla said.

The green lights from the display shone on her milky cheeks like melted emeralds, like algae on ice cream, paranormal and ghastly and strangely luxurious.

“Don’t get used to it,” Danny tore her eyes from Carmilla’s cheek, fiddled with a loose thread on the blanket. “That’s my sentimental side getting the better of me.”

“Awe, darling Daniele, so touchy and diffident. I bet I’d prefer her to this cocksure Spartan looking back at me.”

Danny puffed up as best she could while horizontal, arranging her features into those of a hardened soldier. Because there were parts of herself, Gemini-like and split, that she liked to categorize for her own sanity’s sake. Spartan, yes. Private first-class. Guardian. Teaching Assistant. Leader. Savior. Immortal. And then the other half, because humans can’t fit into contained little boxes, no matter how hard the universe tries to rank and designate them as _this one thing._ Cocksure Danny was also self-conscious. Temperamental. Unworthy. Over-large and inept, twelve years old with an unmanageable frame. Five centuries old with feelings nonnegotiable because she still felt so _human_.

“Who was that, then?” Danny/Daniele deflected, drained beyond comprehension at the night’s turn. “That girl back there that slapped me? The one who probably still thinks I’m an annoying poinsettia hopped up on fertilizer… but who loves me all the same?”

Carmilla found Danny’s hand beneath the blanket, the one fixed on toying with fraying thread. If Danny had possessed the mental capacity for it, there might have been some symbolism to appreciate there. The worn, unwinding yarn, her battered, threadbare psyche, Carmilla’s black-chipped finger, holding it all together.

Danny did not possess said mental capacity.

“That girl?” Carmilla whispered, focusing on Danny’s scarred fingers. “That child?”

Carmilla’s lashes were so long up close. They curved smoothly, delicately, emphasized her eighteen-year-old physicality. She was just a girl, with startlingly attractive features and a countenance weighted with past and future miseries. Just a child. More than a child.

Just a monster.

So much more than a monster.

“She doesn’t know anything,” Carmilla murmured. “Only that she wants to help her friend.”

“Will I get to see her again?” Danny chanced.

“Do I get to see Daniele again?”

“Maybe. In my more pained moments, I’m sure she’ll break out. But I think I… I think I know her. It’s Mircalla, isn’t it? She’s still there, underneath a crap ton of eye liner and bitterness, she’s still there.”

…

…

…

“Go to sleep Red Vine.”

“I’d like to see her again,” Danny offered.

“Once a tercentennial,” Carmilla rebuffed. “She doesn’t surface often.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“Carm—Mircalla,” Daniele said, and clutched the finger that had plucked the syringe from her (saved her life, _saved her life_ , **saved her life** ) in a pressurized hold. “I love you. We can forget this ever happened after today, all the mushy crap. I’m not big on it, but tonight, before it ends, know that you’re my best friend, and I love you for that.”

Daniele placed a chaste kiss on Mircalla’s cheek, backed away, and shut her eyes. The image of that beatific face, equal parts confounded and grateful, was scorched into the backs of her eyelids for the duration of the night.

* * *

 

Mircalla lay sentinel for hours, emotionally taxed, physically overwrought. “I love you, Daniele.”

The lame body’s abdomen rose and fell in the steady hypnosis of sleep, offering the young Countess a moment for honest declamation.

“And I fear, darling, dear Daniele…” she brought the back of a scarred hand to her lips, and made an even more astounding confession: “… that I may be falling _in love_ with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to give a huge shout out to anyone who has left kudos or commented on this series of stories! It's like, a really big deal for me since I don't have a tumblr account/page, which I understand is how stories get 'promoted'. So it really makes my day when anyone stumbles across the works of out-their pairings like these two and takes the time to comment. You guys are the real rock stars! 
> 
> -A


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And I don't know why you couldn't just stay with me / You couldn't stand to be near me / When my face don't seem to want to shine / 'Cause it's a little bit dirty well
> 
> Danny starts physical therapy. Carmilla falls a third time.

Carmilla rolled the wheelchair in at eight o’clock the following morning. Danny scrunched her nose up and eyed the contraption with emphatic loathing.

“Well, fuck.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it? All these years and we don’t have a better way to transport the grievously injured,” Carmilla said.

“Especially after two hour therapy sessions. I’ll never be able to wheel that thing back here.”

“I’m going to push you,” Carmilla said.

“Oh… okay.”

“Okay. Load ‘em up, Big Red. I don’t have all day.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Holy shit!” Danny murmured, sibilantly hostile. “That stings like a hot poker.”

“Super-sensitive EMS,” Gwen, the petite physical therapist, said.

“No, that’s not it, she’s just a pansy,” Carmilla didn’t look up from her book, carefully turning the page to some centuries-old travel guide.

“What?” Danny and Gwen asked simultaneously.

“She’s not PMSing,” Carmilla explained lazily. “It’s not soon enough for _that_ week of over-sensitive aggression.”

“ _E-_ M-S, you deaf old bat,” Danny challenged, and then winced as an electric pulse shot through her muscle. The electrodes forced the meat of her leg to contract and relax; her skin tingled and her legs ached, perched like an overgrown canary on the padded exam tabletop.

“Haaah! Is it supposed to do that?”

“Right here?” Gwen prodded an anterior quad muscle, the pressure both painful and promising for Danny.

“Uh huh,” she grunted.

“There’ve been some significant advancements made in the field of electromyostimulation over the last fifty years,” Gwen explained. “But it’s still not entirely pleasant for the patient.”

Danny thought she heard Carmilla huff. Danny had her own issues with everything advancing in half-century spurts, as if that amount of time was both short and long enough to justify revolutionary progress made in any field, medical, technological, mechanical, etc.

“In my day they just stuck needles into pressure points,” Carmilla said.

“In your day?” Gwen balked, skittish as a brood mare happening upon a rattlesnake. “You mean to say they employed that barbarism what, ten years ago?” Gwen challenged.

“Ignore her. She’s just mad she has to stay up late,” Danny said.

“It’s nine a.m.” Gwen said.

Carmilla arched a goading brow. “All of the literature has been lost, but acupuncture is actually—”

“Just ignore her,” Danny cut Carmilla off. Leave it to a careless vampire to out them as immortals with anachronistic references to centuries-old pain relief techniques.

“Electrostimulation, you were saying?”

“Yes, just squeeze right here, that’s it…”

Carmilla turned another page.

 

* * *

 

 

Danny’s teeth were chattering when Carmilla came to pick her up. Her lips weren’t blue, but her miles of skinny, pale legs were chilled as icicles.

“What the—”

“C-c-cold water im-m-mersion,” Danny explained, using her hands to transfer her weight from chair to wheelchair. Her arms, Carmilla noticed, had bulked up significantly during her first two months of therapy. And her stomach was flat and ribbed as a washboard. Danny had even invested in a pair of gloves specifically for people who used wheelchairs. The redhead had been harping at Carmilla for a month to help her change the wheels on the thing to the angular, racing tires Danny’d spent two weeks researching online.

Carmilla was less than enthused. Leave it to Gingersnap to go careening down a hill at break-neck speed, as if breaking her back hadn’t been enough.

“They’re still doing that ice-bath nonsense?” Carmilla asked, rolling Danny out into the hallway.

“Y-y-yeah,” Danny answered, running her fingers over her arms.

“Your legs are cold, idiot.”

“I can’t _feel_ my legs.”

“Doesn’t mean your brain isn’t registering their temperature. You’ve got some nerve receptors in there, weak and infirm, but they’re still there.”

“Whatever,” Danny harrumphed, and propped a petulant chin on her fist.

Today hadn’t been a great therapy day, judging from Danny’s demeanor. Slumped forward in the chair, eyes dull and unexpressive, Danny’s shoulders rolled in tense dissatisfaction. It was becoming easier for Carmilla to tell the good days from the bad, habitual, gratifying, that Danny’s moods were becoming second nature to her. Except for days like this, when Danny was feeling poorly and stupid things like _empathy_ infiltrated Carmilla’s even-tempered bearing. She hated _caring_ so damn much.

Carmilla wanted to take Danny’s staunch optimism for granted. Nowhere in this ‘friendship’ contract did she sign up for bubbly sanguinity.

“Here,” Carmilla shrugged her jacket off and threw it in Danny’s lap.

“What’s this for?”

“Man killed the mammoth for his fur. I know history was never your best subject—”

“Shut up.”

“—and fashion definitely wasn’t, but you should recognize a coat when you see it. Now wrap it around your legs before I leave you here to push yourself.”

…

…

…

“Thanks.”

“Whatever, Red Vine.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Where’s the chair?” Danny asked cheerfully.

A better day. A day with significant headway. Carmilla hated to break that streak with the news.

“Ruined in the gnome invasion.”

“Gnome invasion?”

“I took care of it.”

“Oh…” Danny said, suddenly infatuated with her limp shoestring. “I thought we’d headed that off.”

“Only missed a nest or two,” Carmilla shrugged her nonchalance, acted as if the whole affair hadn’t taken her through a hellish, tedious battle that had lasted seventy-two hours. Like she needed Danny flipping out over yet another Silas threat that she was unable to combat. Crushing gnome heads back into the smarmy earth from whence they came was toddler activity. Leave it to Danny to get all antsy about something like that.

“Seriously, no big deal, Gingersnap.”

“You should’ve let me help.”

_God, not this again._

“Danny, we’ve been through this—”

“I know,” Danny cut, ending an argument before its beginning. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize—just…” Carmilla stuffed her hands in her pockets, shifted her weight from toe to gnome-stained toe; she tried a topic change: “Seems like you had a good day today?”

Danny brightened like a solar flare.

“I stood up.”

“What?” Carmilla’s head snapped up, and her ribcage inflated with an emotion she’d swear wasn’t joy.

(It was joy).

“Danny, that’s—”

She sidled closer to a beaming Danny, with robin’s egg eyes and carrot-orange locks and cinnamon spackled freckles. Danny was ecstatic, and Carmilla was, too. Her heart hadn’t thumped this violently for anyone since…

Well, in centuries.

“That’s really good for you, Gingersnap.”

Danny flailed her arms about in a euphoric little jig, a spastic rhythm, utterly graceless, and Carmilla had to stomach the fact that she found it so damned _endearing_ , the sincere jubilation Danny could express through something as ludicrous as a thirty-second dance break.

“Drake’s gone, c’mere,” Danny whispered.

“Huh?”

“Just come over here, for a second, before the trainer gets back.”

Carmilla scooted closer and Danny moved herself to the edge of the exam table. Danny reached down and used her hands to spread her legs. She pulled Carmilla between them, put her solid, sturdy palms on top of Carmilla’s shoulders and leaned forward.

Carmilla stopped breathing. (Not that she needed to).

“What are you—?”

“No cracks about my weight, alright?” Danny mumbled, waddling her hips into place so that her ankles hung inches from the floor. She was close enough that Carmilla could smell the perspiration she’d worked up during her rigorous muscle exercises. “You’re my crutch… well, prop.”

“Danny, is this a good—”

“I got this, Dead Girl.”

Carmilla took reverent stock of Danny’s thinning legs, the once-muscular thighs turned spindly and gangly from months of disuse. “Seriously, Daniele—”

“Hey,” Danny said, tilting Carmilla’s downturned chin skyward. “Trust me, alright. Let me show you what I can do.”

As if Carmilla could deny those blue eyes anything.

Carmilla felt Danny’s body tighten, a bowstring drawn, ready to spring loose. There was a rock, a shift, and a slight totter, then there she was, six-foot-plus of dazzling Amazonian frame, weight pressed heavily on Carmilla’s shoulders, like she was trying to shove the vampire back underneath the earth. And if Danny burrowed subterranean with her, if Carmilla got stuck in the tiny box with the walls closing in but with Danny; positive, capable, hopeful Danny… oh god, she could do it.

Carmilla could do anything with Danny.

“See…” Danny grit with potent effort. “Just a matter of time before I start chasing you around with garlic cloves.”

“You already chase me around in that little chair of yours,” Carmilla said, placing her hands around Danny’s sloping waist. She could feel the muscles of Danny’s torso shifting, her lower back quivering from exertion, skin pulled taut and smooth over bony connections. Danny’s body… broken apart and put back together like puzzle pieces with a big-picture end result. And the big picture was the pinnacle of human anatomy.

Danny Lawrence’s body—

Carmilla rubbed her fingers into the indigo crop-top covering Danny’s concave waistline and felt muscle, solid and wriggling and firm and so damn _strong_.

—exemplary.

“So how am I supposed to get back?” Danny growled, forcing Carmilla to focus on her words instead of her form.

“I’m here,” Carmilla offered.

“Please tell me you’re not here to carry me. I had too good a day to end on such a humiliating note.”

“I’m all up for ideas,” Carmilla said, entranced by the quavering plane of muscle that constituted Danny’s flexioned obliques.

“Oh shit,” Danny said, and Carmilla could feel the tremors ripple beneath her fingers, the rebellion in Danny’s straining muscles.

Carmilla felt it happening, in stunted slo-mo, Danny’s wilting legs and her clawing fingers, the fall (not backward, onto the table) forward into her arms. Danny latched onto the leech and Carmilla held her like she would hold a tiny treasure, supernatural frame not expending any undue effort but mentally, emotionally, psychically, Carmilla was holding her whole world. And to know that she could drop her, that Danny could break again… filled Carmilla with an irreconcilable dread.

“S-sorry,” Danny said. Her forehead fell forward and met Carmilla’s throat, an acute fatigue overwhelming her straining skeleton. Danny’s forehead in her neck felt feverish and balmy. Carmilla didn’t mind the sweat, didn’t mind the heat, but the imagined tableau of Danny’s sweating, panting form lying horizontal before her mind’s eye shot a bolt of zinging tension to places directly south of her naval.

“Guess I overdid it,” Danny gulped against her.

“I can see that, Xena.”

They formed an outlandish triangle, rigid Carmilla, the ever-present Silas grounds, and Danny, the long, lean hypotenuse, connecting them all by sheer willpower alone.

“I’m tired.”

“Let’s go then.”

Carmilla pulled Danny closer to her, a wildly intimate molding of bodies and limbs. Her hand was on Danny’s ass and her fingers too close to skimming a swelling breast, but Danny seemed unaffected. The ginger’s chest was heaving, pulse galloping, forehead drenched with sweat, but Danny was used to being tossed about, at least by Carmilla.

The vampire cursed herself for her rising hopes.

_It’s just the physical therapy. Gingersnap has a million other things to worry over besides an immature infatuation._

“Carm, come on. I don’t want you to carry me,” Danny whined.

Carmilla hadn’t heard her this playful, this irritably adorable in _ages_. Which led her to ask:

“So what do you propose we do then? Your new chair won’t be in for another week.”

“A week? Doesn’t Silas have a few back ups?”

“I ordered the racing model you wouldn’t stop blithering about. Thought it would get you off my back. Although, I didn’t quite think it would get you fixated on my front,” Carmilla quipped, and placed Danny gently back on the edge of the table.

“You ordered the racing model?”

“Don’t read anything into it, Red Vine,” Carmilla snapped, a little harsher than intended. “Just makes my job easier. You can cover more terrain without me that way.”

“Thank you, Carmilla.”

“Sure. Now let’s go,” Carmilla said, stepping between Danny’s spread legs. She placed a hand at the bottom of her waist. “I’ll fireman carry you out of here if I have to.”

“I’ve got another idea,” Danny smirked, and Carmilla was done for.

 

* * *

 

 

“See, this isn’t bad at all!”

…

“Come on, Carm, this has got to be easier for you.”

…

“It puts a lot less pressure on you, weight-distribution wise.”

…

“Seriously? I left that door wide-open and no comment on my giantess physique? You’re slacking.”

…

“We won’t do it anymore if you’re going to be so grumpy about it.”

Carmilla stutter-stepped so that Danny fell forward on her back, digging her nails into her skin.

“It’s just something to consider, Bagheera.”

Carmilla growled at that, and only quieted into contented purrs when Danny rubbed the spaces behind her fuzzy black ears. The nurses of the long-term ward were understandably freaked when Danny returned from therapy, riding in faux-majestic glory on the back of a jungle cat, but the staff didn’t approach the patient and pet once the pair got back to Danny’s room in the ward. That was a lion’s (panther’s?) den no one dared broach.

 

* * *

 

 

Carmilla stomped back down the halls of the Silas medical institute to pick Danny up from therapy, awoken at the ghastly hour of eleven a.m. She stalked into the main exercise room, plastic kettle bells and ellipticals abandoned, exercise machines jilted, the entire place lonely as a ghost town. The lights were out and the check-in station unmanned. Carmilla wondered if she’d gotten the time wrong.

“Oh wow, Gwen, that’s it!”

Voices slipped under the crack at the bottom of one of the private examination rooms. Carmilla crept closer to investigate.

“Oh, sorry, I’m being loud.”

“It’s okay. The staff had a luncheon with the people in occupational therapy and the sports medicine undergrads. There’s no one here.”

“Good, cause you’re—I—oh my god.”

“Feel good, Danny?”

“A little higher.”

There was a hollow thudding sound, the maneuvering of weighted bodies and breathless words slipping out from under the exam room door like a noxious gas, filling Carmilla’s nostrils and nestling, sickly and wrathful, in the pit of her gut.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” Danny breathed. “Deeper—shit! More pressure. I can actually feel it. I didn’t think I was going to… Uh… hah, yow.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Gwen’s voice was high and trilling.

“You’re not hurting me,” Danny insisted, sotto voce. “Feels… God, real good. Good pain. Can you… hmm… three fingers? Really hard… Right there…”

“Too much?”

“No, right—hah! There—!”

“Danny?”

“Oh my God, Gwen…”

Carmilla flew through the door to the private exam room to see Danny’s shorts on the floor, and Gwen’s hand digging into the meat of the redhead’s thigh muscle.

“Oh, hi Carmilla,” Gwen said amiably.

The electrode wires ran down Danny’s left leg as Gwen pressed and massaged a hunk of quadriceps, Danny’s head thrown back in a quasi-silhouette of ecstatic pleasure. Her teeth were clenched, her white-knuckled fingers digging into the underside of the exam table from the marvelous physical mauling she was experiencing at the hands of her therapist-turned-masseur.

_Just a deep muscle massage._

_Because she can’t fucking feel her legs._

Envy blasted Carmilla’s body like an exploding landmine. She had to curb the urge to punch through the drywall.

“Time to go, Danny,” Carmilla said coldly.

“Five more minutes, Carmilla. Gwen’s fingers are magic.”

“Some of us have places to be!” Carmilla returned hotly and turned on her heel, slamming the door.

“Carm? Carm, what the hell?!” Danny hollered.

“What’s up with her?”

“It’s Tuesday, so… could be anything.”

“Do you need some help?”

“I’m good. I’ve got my chair so I can get myself back to the ward,” Danny answered.

 

“Here, let me help you with your shorts,” Gwen said, and Danny smiled her thanks.

* * *

 

 

Carmilla, meanwhile, did have somewhere to be. She materialized in black vapors, cried over Laura’s grave, tried to mollify the twinges of jealous affection, all-consuming guilt, devoted attachment, and engulfing passion directed towards Danny Lawrence.

 

* * *

 

“Hey.”

“Hey, get in your chair,” Carmilla said brusquely, throwing a drab duffle bag down at the foot of the hospital bed. It had been about a week since her irrational blow up, and things were finally getting back to normal between herself and Daniele. Here’s hoping she didn’t screw everything up again.

“My session got cancelled. Gwen’s out and Drake’s got his paper presentation today.”

“Not going to rehab.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home.”

“What?”

“We’re going home,” Carmilla repeated, tossing clothes into the bag and swiping laminate-topped hospital tables of their contents. Cups and toiletries and books clattered against each other as they plopped atop the clothes in the bag, which Carmilla zipped with consummate precision and slung over her shoulder.

“You ready?” she asked.

“You mean we’re going back to the cabin?”

“Gingersnap,” Carmilla said, exasperation evident. “Unless you’ve holed up somewhere else I don’t know about for the last five hundred years, then yes, we’re going to the cabin. We’re going home.”

“It’s probably a wreck.”

“It’s not.”

“The fire got the roof—”

“Roof’s fine.”

Danny paused at the edge of the bedside, chin tilted in studious concentration.

“How am I supposed to get up the steps?”

“Taken care of.”

“Carm—”

“Look Clifford, the staff here’s pretty tired of you and me taking up space. And it’s taking more effort out of me than I care to expend, keeping myself from lacerating every last one of these imbeciles. I think it would be best, for all parties involved, if we got the hell outta Dodge and back to the bat cave.”

“I’m with you, 100% on your mixed metaphors,” Danny said, but there was a heaviness to her voice that Carmilla couldn’t decipher. “It’s just… the cabin requires a lot of maintenance and I know that I’m improving, but I’ve got to be realistic, Carm. I can’t get ahead of myself. Gwen says overexertion could be just as detrimental as—”

“Fuck Gwen,” Carmilla sneered, hitching the bag higher on her shoulder. “You’re not going to overexert yourself.”

“I know it’s only a few steps to the porch, but—”

“I took care of it.”

“And it hasn’t been aired out, or dusted, or—hell—vacuumed, I don’t doubt there’s soot and ash every—”

“Danny!” Carmilla stepped closer, placed a hand on Danny’s jerking shoulder. “Daniele, I… I took care of everything.”

“You—”

“Don’t worry about—”

“But what—”

“Daniele, please,” Carmilla begged, and she could feel her request taking flight, lofty and hopeful and the higher it climbed, the more likely she was going to crash. “Please, can we just… go home?”

“Yeah,” Danny said, nodding her head. “Hell yes.”

 

* * *

 

 

Carmilla carried the bag and Danny pushed herself all the way to the edge of the woods. Carmilla dumped the duffle into Danny’s lap and shoved the chair forward over the path she’d cleared early that morning, before dawn had turned the tips of the trees whispy grey. Just after sunrise, the darkness had melted and brightened into the azure slate of Danny’s irises. In the stillness of the dawning it felt as if Danny, so giant and colossal that her eyes comprised the atmosphere, were watching Carmilla rake and shovel and labor over the path.

And Carmilla was simultaneously crushed and bolstered by the weight of the mammoth gaze, wanting to impress and dismiss the attention, wanting nothing more than for Danny to say, “Good job, Nightwalker. But you missed a patch of leaves over by that elm tree, you half-ass.”

Additionally, the glimmering charm hiding their cabin from prying eyes didn’t make it through the fire. Of course it didn’t.

But Carmilla had traipsed half-way around the planet to retrieve those two ingredients that Chuck couldn’t acquire through mail order. She’d spent the better half of the previous week fashioning the dream-catcher weaving into the proper pattern, dipping the wires in the necessary fluids, chopping forest creatures in twain to read the offered entrails. It wasn’t the easiest (or the most sanitary) job, making those charms and enchanted barriers, and there’s no way in _hell_ she was letting Danny know all the shit she went through to get it done, but… doing it relieved her of the weary burden she’d been bearing since that tree fell on Danny.

There was no way Carmilla could ever repay her, not that Danny would _want_ Carmilla to repay her, but she still felt obligated. Or lovesick. Carmilla couldn’t rightfully distinguish between the two states.

“Carmilla!” Danny gasped.

And oh yeah, she’d twisted the arm of the architecture department, forced them to build one sleek-looking ramp up the front porch; they’d also installed walking-assist bars on the kitchen and bathroom walls, patched the roof, cleaned the interior. All under what Carmilla considered very little duress.

She herself painstakingly went through every book and refurbished them as best she could. She didn’t want Danny coming home to a place devoid of stories. Danny lived for those adventures.

“Not too shabby,” Carmilla dismissed, and push her forward.

“Stop.”

“What?”

“You did this?”

“Please, I have minions for chores like this,” Carmilla deflected once more, kept on pushing. “What kind of Nightwalker would I be if I didn’t delegate?”

“Mircalla Karnstein, stop!” Danny flicked the brake handle and her wheels ground into the dirt, rutting up the nice path Carmilla had spent _all fucking morning_ fixing, the dumbass.

“What, Danny? God, let’s just—what the hell are you doing?”

“C’mere.”

“Not until you tell me—”

“Just get your ass over here.”

Carmilla sighed, and trudged forward like an unenthused toddler woken from naptime too early. She watched Danny struggle but the redhead lifted a hand as she worked herself into that confounded standing position.

Leaning on Carmilla.

Depending on Carmilla.

Danny’s crutch.

_Carmilla’s crutch._

So mutually dependent and entwined neither could see the desperation with which they were clinging to the other.

“Thank you,” Danny whispered, and latched onto Carmilla’s body so tightly it felt as if Carmilla’s ribs would puncture her skin and shoot out of her thoracic cavity. “Mircalla, thank you so much for this. Those nights at the hospital… it did bad things to me…”

“I know,” Carmilla said, and forced herself to focus on the Danny in the forest before her. This Danny, in front of her, healthier, grounded, mentally thriving, was her Danny; not that whimpering redhead she’d curled into bed with every night after the night terrors, not the woman who’d stare at her legs in bed for countless early hours, gritting her teeth and pounding her frustrated fists into broken kneecaps.

This Danny was different.

But Carmilla held a soft spot for both of them, all the same.

“You seemed a little drained,” Carmilla admitted to her shoulder. “Haggard and world-weary is not a good look for you, Tauriel.”

Danny smiled into her hair, and Carmilla could feel the gradual shifting of lips, a semi-circle of delight branded into her skull.

“I like that one,” Danny said.

“Hmm?”

“Tauriel.”

“Oh, well, I’ll be sure to never use it again.”

“I swear my ears got pointier after the change.”

“You wish.”

“You’ve pretty much exhausted all other appropriate nicknames, Carm. What else could you call me?”

Darling. Dearest. My gallant Red Knight. Not sweet heart, but definitely heart-inspired. Not braveheart; Danny could pull off that Scots bit with her red hair and staggering height but Carmilla didn’t need to be sidetracked by a misappropriated historical film when considering Danny. So not braveheart… but maybe lionheart?

_Yes, definitely lionheart. My lionhearted-love. My third chance._

“I’m sure I can think of something, Daniele,” Mircalla answered. She pulled Daniele tighter, held her up, and restrained herself from bawling into her shoulder from the murmured ‘thank yous’ she heard spilling from Daniele’s lips. She only just kept from kissing Danny’s sternum, right where her lips rested, where Danny’s lionheart beat victoriously.

A bird squawked and broke the spell; the pair detached and laughed, both of them most certainly _not_ swiping discreetly at happy tears.

“You don’t intend to carry me over the threshold, do you?” Danny joked, flopping back down into her chair. She tugged her gloves tighter over her wrists and pushed forward toward the base of the ramp.

“Hardly, Gingersnap,” Carmilla said. “You’d miss out on the chance to christen your little obstacle course here. Plus there’s too much mawkish sentiment associated with the action that I’d never be able to stomach walking into that place again.”

“Can’t have you never coming home, then,” Danny said, rolling along the ramp as Carmilla ascended the steps.

They were both going to the same place, just via different routes. Danny had to take the long way up, but Carmilla was already at the threshold, ready to go in, fretful and impatient.

“Exactly,” Carmilla said blandly. “Whatever would you do without me?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Danny said seriously, and rolled across the floorboards while Carmilla held the door open.

 

* * *

 

 

“Check it out,” Danny said triumphantly, pointing toward what Carmilla assumed was either a torture device or a very small person’s jungle gym. Either way, she couldn’t very well figure as to why they needed it in the cabin.

“What is that, Big Red?” Carmilla asked dully, lifting her eyes from her book. Danny was just back from her most recent therapy session with Drake, who Carmilla much preferred to _Gwen_ , for some reason she didn’t care to dwell on. “We’re already running low on space as it is, since this place doubles as your armory.”

“It’s a walker, you spoil-sport.”

“Spoil-sport am I? I didn’t throw four different kinds of tantrums over my incorrect answers during trivial pursuit.”

“You know what, Inez Rivera _did_ get elected as head of the European National Council in 2243, _you_ were just in the middle of your whole ‘I’m too good for civilization’ kick during that decade.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“Probably because you spent the majority of that time high, sipping on ayahuasca brew with that Peruvian crew you wouldn’t stop sending me postcards of.”

“You loved those postcards,” Carmilla rebutted. “There’s two still on the fridge.”

“That is beside the point.”

“And just what was the original point of this conversation? I don’t usually scamper off on such unrelated tangents.”

Danny crossed her arms in her chair and flicked two handles on the sides of the torture device… uh, walker. Carmilla watched Danny lock metal bars into sockets with an easy concentration. Then Danny did her wobble, her teeter, and up she stood… heading toward Carmilla almost as fast as her little racing chair allowed.

“Well, aren’t you just the massive Red Engine that Could.”

“Weak, Carm,” Danny snickered. “Unlike me. I’m walking. Well, limping. Almost like an actual person. Or… some geriatric, but still. Better than wheeling myself around all day.”

“Hey,” Carmilla cut, rising from the chair. “You’re a person, hurt or not, ‘mkay?”

“Sure, you know what I mean,” Danny said.

“Danny… what did your therapist say?”

“She said no more than two hours on this a day, once in the morning, one in the evening—”

“Your other therapist.”

“Oh. Huh?”

Carmilla stared gravely, waited for Danny acknowledge her own verbal misstep, the self-deprecation that led to self-hate, and, in extreme cases, to self-harm. (That night Carm walked in on Danny with that needle, when Carmilla’s throat had closed in on itself in paranormal anaphylaxis, when she’d seen Danny, so intent on hurting herself, on _killing_ herself, that she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t hardly function. Couldn’t believe she’d made it through the night alive, and Daniele breathing with her.)

“You know what I mean,” Carmilla said. “You can make all the physical progress in the world but if you’re not right in the head—”

“Like you’re right in the head?” Danny threw back.

“This isn’t about me.”

“This is very much the blackened leather pot calling out a kettle.”

“You’ve got to stop thinking that your achievements define you.”

“What are we, if not the sum of our achievements?” Danny questioned. “If at the end of our run, we can’t say, ‘Look, look at this thing I did. Look how I lived. Look at what I won. Look at who I lov—…saved.’ That matters. Leaving something positive matters, so don’t berate me for being angry that I can’t _do_ something worthwhile. Silas is struggling because I’m struggling. I’m useless right now.”

“You’re worthwhile,” Carmilla insisted. “Just you. Not what you do. You’re enough.”

“Who’s fluffy-bunny crap philosophy is that?” Danny challenged.

“Laura’s,” Carmilla said through terse lips, throat raw beneath an invisible noose.

…

…

…

“Oh. I… uhm…”

“I’m going out. Have fun with your new toy.”

“Carm—”

Carmilla slammed the door behind her. The cabin frame shuddered, and dead leaves poured out of the gutter and onto the ground below. Carmilla crunched over them and poofed away.

 

* * *

 

 

“Hey.”

…

…

…

“Oh god, hey, s-s-sorry.”

“Don’t get up.”

“No, Carm I—I’m awake.”

“Tell that to the drool on your chin.”

“I didn’t… uh, do you want some tea?”

“I’m fine, Gingersnap.”

“Carm, god, I’m sorry—”

“Forget it.”

“No, really, I never meant to insult… I never meant to… to belittle Laura. I was out of line.”

…

…

…

“Gods know she was little enough already.”

“Definitely. So flipping cute, with her spatula and her bear spray. We… we should go visit her, if you want…? Carm?”

“She needs new flowers.”

“We’ll get her some.”

“And cocoa. It’s winter. She’s cold.”

“Of course. Right. The triple chocolate kind. She only ever deserved the best.”

“Fuck—!”

…

…

…

“Daniele?”

“Yes?”

“I have to believe what I said. I have to believe her.”

“Okay…”

“So you have to believe me.”

“I don’t see how that mental leap applies.”

“You have to believe me, because she has to be right about it.”

“Why, Carm? Why does Laura have to be right?”

…

…

…

“Because then it doesn’t matter that I’m a monster.”

“Oh god Carm—”

“Danny, don’t—”

“Carm, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Shit, what’s there to be sorry ab—”

“Don’t do this, that’s not you. You’re not a—no. You are a monster.”

“Thanks.”

“But you’re not _monstrous_. Take a little credit for yourself.”

“Grounds crew. Two deceased, the night you were injured. Cause of death: exsanguination.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“You’re a cripple and I’m a monster.”

“No.”

“Fangs prove the contrary.”

“No. You’re not.”

“But what about what you said? Are we not the sum of our parts? If we break it down, we take one part eye liner, half a demon, one fourth attitude—”

“You’re right. Laura’s right. Just stop talking like that!”

…

…

…

“Now you know how it feels.”

“How what feels?”

“To hear your best friend belittle herself so carelessly. You’re more than your legs, Danny.”

“Fine. You’re more than your fangs.”

…

…

…

“Well… aren’t we just two fucking assholes, then?”

“It would appear so, Countess. And I’m too tired and pissed to think about it any more.”

“Same.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Alright.”

“Well…?”

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“I didn’t think—”

“We both know this is going to be a bad night for me.”

“You just… you never said anything before.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to be called out on my crutch? I use enough actual crutches during the daytime. Why would I want to harp on my night terrors?”

“Danny—”

“I know. I’m working on it. Just… come to bed, and I promise to work on it.”

“I…”

“I know.”

…

…

…

“Goodnight, Mircalla.”

…

…

…

“Goodnight, Daniele.”

 

* * *

 

 

“It’s ‘all the rest’!”

“No, it’s, ‘the professor and, Mary-Anne’.”

“You’re wrong. You weren’t even alive when they were airing those episodes.”

“There’s such a thing as re-runs, Dead Girl,” Danny fumed, booting up her computer.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Carmilla asked, downing her mug of chamomile mixed with O negative. Danny would never understand the combination, but it did seem to calm Carmilla… _slightly_.

“Proving you wrong.”

“Do they still have those up?” Carmilla asked. “That show’s gotta be—”

“As old as you are,” Danny quipped.

“Oh, you think you’re funny, do you?”

Danny scoffed and straightened up to her full height. “I _know_ I’m funny.”

“You’re also incorrect.”

“Let’s let Ya-Bing-Google-Hoo decide that, shall we?”

“That’s ridiculous, but go ahead, type it in.”

 

* * *

 

 

Three hours later and the pair were curled up on the couch, popcorn bowl depleted to naught but solitary kernels, sodas drained to swill, fuzzy socks donned on ice cube toes. The hologram screen projected a misfit crew comprised of a skipper, a first mate, a couple of millionaires, the girl next door, a professor, and a movie star.

And the Harlem Globetrotters. On an uncharted desert isle.

Go figure.

The cabin felt intimately cramped; Carmilla hadn’t set foot outside in over twenty-four hours due to the heavy snowfall. The atmosphere felt arid, the fireplace licking the hearth and heat billowing from that single wall, crawling across the floor and mingling with the tedium of snowed-in winter activities. They were sharing a plaid blanket with red and black squares, woolen, cozy, itchy and blood-stained (from an accident on Carmilla’s part with her souvenir mug from Bora Bora, not from any type of supernatural skirmish).

Carmilla squirmed when Danny twitched, the red head _snoozing on her shoulder_ definitely _not_ making her feel needle pricks on the insides of her elbow, or the arches of her feet, or the hollow of her chest. It was just the fire, the cloying, pressurized ether in the cabin, having been cooped up too long without feeding, without smoking.

That had to be it.

Carmilla just needed a fucking cigarette.

But then Danny shifted and her hand fell onto Carmilla’s stomach.

Carmilla felt she could let the Zippo rest for a few hours more.

“Are we still watching this?” Danny mumbled.

“ _I’m_ watching it. You fell asleep.”

“I fell asleep after I made my point,” Danny mumbled, shifting her hips. Her foot fell to the floor with a _thud_ , a weight that would’ve been uncomfortable if Danny’s sensory perception had returned quicker.

But it hadn’t. Danny still couldn’t feel light pressures on her legs.

Which is why Carmilla took every opportunity to place her hand on them (tenderly, chastely, lovingly) when she could. Like right now. Her hand, under the blanket, rubbing circles on Danny’s knee, and Danny, slowly stirring to coherence, either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“We were both right, if you recall,” Carmilla grumbled. “’And the rest’ in season one, ‘the professor and Mary Anne’ in the following seasons.”

“I can’t believe you finished the movie,” Danny said, tugging her tangle of fine red locks away from her face. She sat up and offered Carmilla a droopy smile, like a bloodhound with half a treat poking out of its fleshy muzzle.

Carmilla clawed into the meat of her palm with her nails, restraining herself from reaching out and just… touching.

“This was the first television show I ever watched,” Carmilla snuggled under the blanket, drew the fabric close around her shoulders. Maybe if she imprisoned herself in the flannel like a burrito she wouldn’t be tempted to do something stupid… like kiss Danny.

“No way!” Danny rocketed up, delighted. “Seriously? The first one?”

“Yes,” Carmilla said, a half-grin forming in the firelight. “I remember thinking… well…”

“What?”

“I didn’t think television would take off the way it did,” Carmilla admitted. “Looking at the hologram projection now, thinking back to the traveling peddlers that would occasionally visit Styrian schlosses… so much has changed in the way of entertainment.”

She caught Daniele’s inquisitive gaze.

_In the way of polite company, as well._

“You thought TV was just going to be a fad?” Danny asked.

“Well, going to the picture show was still such a big thing,” Carmilla explained. “And at the time, only those exceedingly well off could afford television sets.”

“Like yourself,” Danny said knowingly.

“I had my methods,” Carmilla replied, cryptic, joking. Her head rolled back on the couch cushion and she stared at the beams of the cabin, as if the roof housed a crystal ball for past observances. “It was… strange. Films were these huge stories, massive in scale, giants of narration, projected on walls in Cinemascope and Technicolor—”

“You’re _really_ aging yourself here, Carm.”

“But television was so much more… intimate. You were letting these narratives into your homes. Into your personal space. On these small screens, but there were people _inside_ the talking boxes. For a while I thought the people were actually _in there_ , a shrunken, diminutive little species. Like Lilliputians, or something.”

“Lily-what—”

“It’s almost violating, intrusive, what those few channels shoved down the throats of a generation for those two or three decades,” Carmilla surmised.

“You mean like blatant sexism, racism, classism—”

“So I just preferred to watch a show where they could fashion indoor-plumbing out of bamboo,” Carmilla concluded. “Suspend my terrible disbelief for something light-hearted. A truly prosaic escapism, but the sixties were a strange time for me.”

“I can imagine,” Danny said, propping up so that she sat shoulder-to-much-taller-shoulder with Carmilla. “But there’s such blatant gender stereotypes here,” Danny argued. “And the whole ‘idiot sidekick’ trope. How is that funny?”

“In the same way that you getting hit with that mud pie in the face from the tree gremlins is funny. Slapstick is just that… it’s these actors’ schtick. A gimmick. A gag.”

“But what about the debate?” Danny asked, the blanket sliding low to reveal an off-the-shoulder sweater: with plains of freckly skin and a collarbone so prominent it looked like a cliff jutting out against a mountain range. Suddenly Carmilla was very attracted to the idea of hiking.

“What debate?” she returned her focus skyward.

“Ginger or Mary Anne?”

“Come again, Red Vine?”

“The whole, ‘who do you prefer?’ thing,” Danny explained.

“Who do I prefer?”

“Yes, haven’t you heard of the—”

“Ginger. All the way,” Carmilla said, twiddling her fingers below the blanket. “Tall, strong, glamorous. She knows what she wants, and she can wear sequins on an island.”

“That’s not what I—wait,” Danny said, double-taking, firm rebuttal morphing into the biggest shit-eating grin Carmilla had seen since Danny’s paralysis. “Ginger?” Danny asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Hell yeah,” Carmilla returned slyly, extracting her hands from underneath the afghan. Who knows what all that fiddling about looked like from the outside. She flicked at the hologram to move on to the next episode.

“Is it the waxy pale skin that would no doubt go to burning and peeling in tropical climates that does it for you?” Danny joked.

“I’m not going to elaborate,” Carmilla returned, cocooning into Danny’s side like a fickle kitten, ready for attention.

“Well, it’s spurred a lot of debate, you know,” Danny said, shifting to accommodate her.

“Has it?”

“Yeah, like, men choosing whether they prefer the glamorous lady or the girl next door. Because we’re simple enough to only be one thing. Heaven forbid women embody complex characteristics and a spectrum of personality traits. We can do both: wear sequins and build huts in the woods. We don’t just cook things with coconut water and pineapples.”

“Danny, they just made a helicopter out of bamboo, don’t over analyze this.”

Carmilla inhaled sharply, for Danny had shifted and currently sat inches from her face, those large, scarred hands framing her cheeks. She could smell the lemon-lime carbonation from the soda on Danny’s tongue, could see a rogue grain of salt residing in the divot above Danny’s upper lip. Could feel those fingers, tapered and fortified like a concert pianist’s, running through her own hair, tugging her locks to either side of her ears.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Carmilla breathed. She’d tried to instill the query with a hint of malice, but this close, with Danny touching her, it just came across as a miffed sort of daze.

“Just seeing if we could wrangle you into some pig-tails,” Danny smiled. “Throw on one of those plaid button ups and knot it above your belly-button, we’d kill at the Zeta’s Halloween throwdown. Put those Neanderthals to massive shame.”

“Those bumbling brethren wouldn’t catch a reference that old.”

“You never know. Maybe there’s a media studies major among them who would appreciate our effort.”

“Well, you don’t have brown eyes,” Carmilla said.

“And you don’t have blue eyes,” Danny remarked, twirling the end of one of Carmilla’s partial pigtails around her finger. “But, that doesn’t mean we can’t still dress up. We don’t have to fit a mold like that, anyway. I’ve got Mary Anne’s blue eyes and Ginger’s body. You’ve got the brunette thing going for you and those smoky, movie-star almond eyes that make Audrey Hepburn look plain. It’s nice to have a little variety, wouldn’t you say?”

“You just compared me Hepburn.”

“Sorry, I can’t see you through your swelling ego.”

“I heard it,” Carmilla said smugly.

“I’m having a hard time walking but I’m not _blind_ , Carm,” Danny blushed prettily, and again, it was nice, interesting, after all these years, to know that Danny Lawrence wasn’t just _one thing_. Sure, she would fight tooth and nail to prove her point, was stubborn as fifteen mules that had woken on the wrong side of the hay, but Carmilla took heart in the notion that Danny could still get embarrassed and blush a little, especially over sitting beside a pretty girl on a couch.

“You want to rail against 1960s television, Lawrence?”

“I don’t know if my fragile psyche could handle any more,” Danny flopped dramatically backward and threw an arm over her face. When she spoke, her voice had skittered up an octave, turned breathier, adopted a southern twang: “After all, I’m just a feeble-minded woman, however could I cope with such difficult concepts?”

“Hold onto your skirts there, Miss Scarlett. You ever hear tell of a show called _I Dream of Genie_?”

“No… and I’m starting to hope that I don’t,” Danny said warily.

“She actually calls the man her ‘master’.”

“Oh god. I’m both appalled and intrigued.”

“More popcorn?”

“More popcorn.”

 

* * *

 

 

Carmilla cracked the door open at four in the morning, forest sounds lingering in her ears, fresh blood in her esophagus. She felt good, sated, prepped for some quiet time with this week’s latest text at her bedside. Danny had even special ordered the replacement oil for her vintage lamp they found in the Silas catacombs; the light was easier to read by, functionality and nostalgia well balanced. She flopped down with her boots still on, the mud clods caked onto the quilt sure to instigate some future feud between herself and the Ginger Giant. At a hundred pages into Kafka, she heard the familiar whimpers.

“Danny?” Carmilla called softly.

Some nights were worse than others, and tonight was one of those nights. Danny flopped against her sheets like a flustered haddock on the planks of a dock; she gaped, glassy-eyed, with a dead, unseeing vision. She knocked her wrist against a bedpost before Carmilla catapulted down from the loft to restrain her.

Danny had been (slowly, a months-long endeavor) regaining feeling in her legs. Her muscles were strong enough now that she could kick out, stand, hobble on her crutches, but the nerves, the stringy, electric pulses that commanded her limbs to straighten and bend, were short-circuiting.

A big knee flew upwards and caught Carmilla in the gut; the frightful squawk Danny released rang through Carmilla’s ears with the bellowing resonance of a freight train.

“Shhhhh… Daniele, Daniele, wake for me,” she called.

Carmilla attempted to smother her, to press into her from the side (the vampire had learned quickly that Danny did not like to be held down from above, didn’t like Carmilla’s weight to rest so heavily below her hips). Carmilla gripped a flailing bicep and rubbed it, murmured hushes and shhhhhs until the comforts acquired melody, not quite a song and not quite poetic speech, just a constant stream of low, aural reassurances. Danny’s pupils shrunk in the darkness and the flailing ceased; Carmilla felt Danny’s pulse thundering, her muscles straining below her moving fingertips.

“Carm—” Danny muttered, voice cracking like an eggshell.

“What’s wrong?”

“My leg, I… it hurts.”

“What did you—”

“Charlie horse, left side,” Danny spat, as if it were taking every ounce of her composure not to burst into swears that would make a sailor turn crimson in the face.

“You have a horse in your leg?”

“Mus—ha, mus-cle, _cramps_.”

Carmilla scooted away from Danny’s back and slid down the bed, pulling the covers with her.

“Left side?”

“My—ow! Calf,” Danny rolled over and yanked the chain on the bedside lamp. The room flooded with orangeburst, a mustard mixed tangerine glow banking the wooden walls and the black paned-glass of the cabin windows. Danny grit her teeth and propped herself on her elbows, crooked her left knee up so that her foot fell flat on the mattress.

“I just gotta—work it out, that’s what Gwen says,” Danny relayed.

“Hasn’t some monster devoured her yet?” Carmilla grumbled.

“H-huh?”

“Nothing, what can I do?” Carmilla hovered near Danny’s lower end, hands held aloft, directionless. There seemed to be a hunk of _something_ the size of a yo-yo poking out of the back of Danny’s left calf, like one of those Egyptian scarab beetles that crawled underneath human flesh.

“Just… gotta—”

“Danny! What do I do?”

“Grab my foot, press it backwards.”

Carmilla took hold of the large arch of Danny’s ginormous (she would give her hell for that later) foot. Her other hand found the back of Danny’s knee and she pressed, used her position for the leverage she needed, back-back-back until she was sure she was going to snap the tendons anchoring Danny’s bulky calf muscle to her ankle.

“Now down,” Danny directed, fingers _ripping_ into the sheet. “So that my toe… ah, points. Back and—”

“Back and forth, got it.”

Carmilla took Danny’s foot in hand and pumped it like a lever; up and down, back and forth. Occasionally, she’d throw in a twist, and would circle Danny’s ankle counterclockwise while squeezing against the meat of her leg with firm palpitations. Carmilla kneaded the muscle, attempted to coerce the straining bulge into submission while Danny sat back and clutched the sheets, enduring the ordeal with terse lips and furrowed brows.

Carmilla ran her hand along the tight sinews on the underside of Danny’s shin. In her night shorts, Danny’s legs seemed forever long, the muscley knot a rock refusing to disintegrate. Carmilla moved closer, pressed harder, squeezing and hammering in a sumptuous combination of rubs and tapotement that left Danny groaning above her. Carmilla’s hand would stray from its position occasionally, brushing the underside of Danny’s knee, at that baby-soft hollow of skin that curved there.

Carmilla let her head fall and rest on Danny’s kneecap as she rubbed and pulverized the knot; she could feel the bony meniscus curving, the cruciate ligaments crisscrossing, the patella itself wiggling beneath the load of her head. Her movements slowed as the knot began to give, Danny’s moans and harrumphs sliding into gasps and contented murmurs that set Carmilla’s ears ablaze. The vampire could feel the heat of her own breath, puffing against the top of Danny’s shin, blasting back against her own face.

With great mental strain did Carmilla comprehend that she was between Danny’s legs, touching, _ravishing_ the woman’s muscles with her contact, and Danny had yet to dismiss her. Gingersnap’s calf had softened into a beefy sort of smush; Carm rolled it about until she could press her fingers into the leg and it would give, soft as vegetable puree. She tried not to think about quieting Daniele above her, tried not to think about kissing that kneecap, that beautiful, indomitable convex bone of Danny Lawrence’s, right beneath her lips…

“Carm…?” Danny whispered above her.

Propped on her elbows with her tank hiked up her ribcage, Danny looked extravagant. Her features seemed pointed as cleavers, a defined jaw and cheekbones curved to guillotine sharpness; her eyes were tinted a secret, cornflower blue, moist with collected tears she stubbornly refused to shed. Her hair tumbled over her freckled shoulders, freckles Carmilla could count and draw patterns upon, her own personal constellations on a body just shy of heavenly. The bedside lamp cast Danny in a half shadow, turned her mysterious, incomplete, so that Carmilla felt it her duty to rejuvenate the Guardian, to take Danny out of that darkness (reserved for herself alone) and help Danny get back where she belonged: riding high in the light like a Valkyrie, an arch angel with glorious drive and purpose.

Carmilla could give her that, _wanted_ to give her that. Wanted to show Danny how much she believed in her, how much she… how much she _loved_ her for what she was doing.

“Danny…” Carmilla kissed Danny’s kneecap.

Danny tensed again but didn’t stir. Carmilla trailed her hand down Danny’s leg, down over the rigid shin, a shin peppered with bruises from bumping into the legs of a walker. She trailed it all the way down past Danny’s pliant ankle and over her foot, touched the very tips of Danny’s toenails, painted in a sheeny emerald gloss.

Carmilla smiled at that, because Danny wasn’t just _one thing_. She was a guardian, a damn fine one, and if she wanted to paint her toes the color of the forest she was protecting then good, great, the color contrasted beautifully with the _gets-shit-done_ bruises stippling her healing legs.

“This is pretty, Gingersnap,” Carmilla whispered, playing at ‘One Little Piggy’ with Danny’s toes.

“Carmilla… what… uh, thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” Carmilla said.

She swiveled about and placed Danny’s left foot, bent at the knee and planted on the mattress, on her right side. She found herself stuck between another long leg, so long she’d just now realized Danny took to sleeping diagonal on the bed itself. Carmilla placed her hands on Danny’s knees and slid them north, dragging her fingernails over the muscles Danny had been endeavoring so steadfastly to rebuild.

“You, however,” Carmilla chanced, resting her hands on Danny’s stalwart hips. “…are beautiful.”

“What are you…”

“Danny—”

“God, Carm—”

Danny sprang up from the bed and Carmilla crushed herself against her. Carmilla felt like a projectile released from a trebuchet, flung at the highest speed physics allowed until she smacked against the unyielding force that constituted one Danny Lawrence. When she molded her lips against Danny’s it felt like her face had turned to clay and her partner, Danny, darling, dearest Daniele, was a potter remolding her to fit, _just there_ , against her.

Danny wasn’t changing her on the elemental level; the components, the muddy, the dirty, the gritty, they were all there, still blackened and injured as she ever was. But the form, Carmilla’s form, had undergone significant modifications: a little less rough around the edges, softer, certainly in her old age. Danny had warped Carmilla, bent her, diluted her, reshaped her into someone who cared, a useful someone, into someone who (no matter how vehemently she protested) worried about Silas; someone who gave a damn about the kids who chose to spend their formative adult years on the campus.

And in Danny’s arms, under her guidance, working alongside her, as a partner, as an equal, as a… whatever they were… Carmilla found her reason to keep going.

Carmilla slipped her tongue past Danny’s lips and cradled Danny’s face in her creamy palms. She shifted to her knees between Danny’s spread legs so she could rise, and press, and tug Gingersnap’s chest flush against her own.

The potter’s wheel turned, and the lump flattened out.

“Are we—”

“Yes, we’re—”

“Can I—?”

Carmilla disengaged from Danny’s mouth to tug the ribbed tank top overhead and toss it over the edge of the bed. She rose on her knees and towered over Danny, tilted that red head of hair back until her vision flooded with blue: heaven and ocean and sapphire love, her most cherished friend who _believed_ in her, who supported her, who had been there, waiting for her for centuries.

A soulmate, maybe.

Her lionheart.

Carmilla braided her fingers into Danny’s hair and kissed her breathless.

The wheel picked up speed, the clay softened into shape.

Carmilla felt Danny’s hands (robust, durable, calloused) on her naval, on her lower back, on her arms. Forming her, lifting her, fondling her, requiting, God, _requiting_ her, as Danny lay back, bringing Carmilla down with her. Carmilla could feel Danny’s breath titter over her neck when Danny nuzzled into the concave slope; shivered a little when she felt that rough skin grasp her hip, the other tangled up in the hem of her shirt and tugging, mildly, so gently for one so strong. Danny pulled the lace over Carmilla’s shoulders to expose her upper half.

The potter’s hands were on the clay, pressing and urging.

Carmilla meandered from Danny’s mouth, spent precious time working a trail over jugular, clavicle, sternum and breast, pawing and stroking and open-mouthed kissing until she paused and swirled at Danny’s belly, cast gloomy eyes upward for permission.

“Can you feel me?” Carmilla asked, kissing a hipbone, running a finger along the inside of Danny’s thigh.

“Yes,” Danny breathed, nodded, bit her lip as her legs trembled. “But, uh… just in case…” Danny flopped her right hand down near her hips and Carmilla smirked, taking those fingers and twisting them into her own as she helped Danny work her shorts off with her free hand.

Cast and sculpted, brilliantly formed, the potter set the piece in the kiln to roast into usefulness.

Carmilla felt Danny’s right hand clench her own. Danny’s left clutched a chunk of her hair when Carmilla placed her mouth against her.

“Oh shit, Carm—”

Carmilla rethreaded their twined fingers, nails digging into the back of Danny’s hand. She helped Danny prop her gangly, weakened leg over her own shoulder and felt the brunt of it, of Danny’s love and pseudoimmortality, settle over her frame like the snuggliest blanket, the most secure leather jacket, the deepest, most cogent philosophy. She worked between Danny’s legs and held onto Danny’s hand, her lifeline, her yarned lead in the densest forest, until she felt Danny squirm below her.

Carmilla retracted long enough to breath out _Daniele_ , which sent ripples over flesh and Danny’s back arching toward the cabin’s rafters.

Withdrawn from the kiln and set to cool, the clay piece looked forward to a newer, shinier purpose.

After the affair and Danny’s pleas for reciprocation, after Carmilla’s stringent denial, they lay in Danny’s bed in a peculiar afterglow, birdsong chirping as dawn broke and filtered through the floral curtains.

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s there to understand?” Carmilla asked.

“I didn’t think we… what does this mean?”

“Don’t over think it, Gingersnap,” Carimlla said, and twisted a long cinnamon lock around her fingers.

Danny grabbed her wrist and held it until Carmilla made eye contact.

“You always tell me that,” Danny said. “'Don’t over think it.' But I have to, I need to. This means something, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Carmilla affirmed, but didn’t elaborate.

“I need more than that,” Danny stated, and pulled Carmilla's body closer.

Carmilla spread her fingers over Danny’s sternum and felt the subdued thumping of her heart, the _rat-rat, rat-rat_ , a snare drum in a melancholy jazz number. She smiled at the beat and tried to memorize the pattern.

“You call me Bagheera,” Carmilla began.

Danny pinched her hip beneath the covers. “Try to be serious, here.”

“I am, darling, if you would but grant me the opportunity to explain,” Carmilla continued, grinning at Danny’s confusion over the endearment. ‘Darling’ rolled off her tongue like a first language, as if Carmilla had spoken it in her youth and the word had returned, without any strain on her mental faculties, to pacify her perplexed lover.

“If I am Bagheera, then you, my darling and dearest Daniele… are a mongoose.”

“I’m a what?”

“A mongoose,” Carmilla replied smugly, arching a goading brow.

“That may have had the ladies swooning once upon a time, but here in the year three thousand and—”

“Patience,” Carmilla chided, hitching a leg over Danny’s hip. “You’re familiar with Kipling, I presume?”

“Yes, Countess, I know who Kipling is,” Danny rolled her eyes dramatically.

“Then you know that _The Jungle Book_ was a succession of short stories—”

“—by a wildly racist individual.”

“Do you want your story or not?” Carmilla asked, baring her fangs at Danny.

“I’ll pipe down,” Danny conceded.

“Within that collection was the story of a mongoose, named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”

“Oh God—”

“Danny,” Carmilla cut, and Danny raised her hands in mock surrender. “Rikki was this… little ball of fury, washed up on a family’s bungalow step and commissioned to protect them from the venomous snakes,” Carmilla recounted, fingers tapping in rhythm with Danny’s heart. “And when he would get angry, when he shifted into his protective mode, his eyes grew red, piercing, flaming. He was this valiant little thing, strong enough to combat the Indian wilds, whatever the jungle threw at his family, he protected them.”

“I feel like I might outweigh a mongoose,” Danny muttered.

“Yes, but consider…” Carmilla’s hand drifted over Danny’s shoulder and scuttled down her arm, linking with her fingers and dragging the palm up to her eye level. “Rikki was working at a significant disadvantage, size-wise. You might be big enough, but you can break, as we have well seen. So you have your weaknesses, and he has his, but that doesn’t stop either one of you. You were bumbling about on that staff the other day in the glade, don’t think I didn’t see you batting at those mutated bee hives.”

“Why anyone would inject lethal venomous genes into honeybees is beyond me. I was heading off a threat before it got worse,” Danny bristled.

Carmilla chuckled. “I know.”

“So does this mean you love me?”

“Of course, we’ve already had this conversation.”

“No,” Danny said, staring at their twined hands. “This means we _love_ each other.”

“We loved each other before sex,” Carmilla insisted. “Right?” she said, suddenly unsure.

“Carm,” Danny said gleefully, and bent down to kiss Carmilla. “Or perhaps I’m talking to Mircalla, here? A little more delicate, I love the way you speak when you… when you lapse into sentiment,” Danny giggled. “I’m so glad I lived through that tree thing, just so I get to love you.”

“Truly?” Mircalla asked, and smiled and smiled.

“So happy. I'm going to crush you, though.”

Mircalla’s smile broke into a snort of affection when she buried her head into Danny’s neck, kissed each fingertip, drowned in her blue eyes. “Nothing could crush me, least of all you,” she responded. “My giant mongoose. My _lionheart_.”

“I knew you’d make a crack about my skeleton soon enough,” Danny teased.

“I do so look forward to the day that you can carry your weight again, so you can hover above me like—like now?!” Mircalla started, eyeing Danny above her, sitting on her knees, resting her full weight on her legs, legs that had been too weak to hold weight mere minutes before.

“Danny? Daniele! What’s—”

Danny caught her in a ferocious kiss, too much teeth, raking, gnawing, uncomfortable and vile. Mircalla twisted away and met Danny’s eyes, cool blue burned away by the same enchanted fire that had crippled her in the first place.

“I don’t—”

“It wasn’t me that would crush you, dearest Mircalla,” Danny’s voice seemed to echo over the cabin walls; yet they were no longer in the cabin, were no longer in Danny’s bed. The walls were painted a raisiny noir, were cold, rough-hewn, and smelled of freshly cut panes of lumber.

Like a coffin.

_God, no. No, please._

“It’s just reality. Life doesn’t want to see you happy,” Demon-Danny above her purred, held her down, forced her head into a pillow of onyx and decay.

“Danny—”

“Did you think I would be your salvation? Your vindication? People keep dying and hurting and what’s the common denominator, sweetling? You. You and your rot. You know I only do this to shed light on what you are, on what you don’t want to see—”

“Mother, please—”

“Begging is for the weak, child. You think you can undermine me by attaching yourself to one who lives? She lives within _boundaries_ , Mircalla. She is not like us. She cannot travel, can make no mark beyond that insult to an educational institution. You’ve seen how breakable, how _unworthy_ she is, but you’ve always harbored such a tender spot for the inadequate. When will you learn they can never stay with you!”

“Mother, no! I understand, I can change—”

“Fool me once, shame on you, my black pearl. Fool me twice…”

* * *

 

The beautiful piece of pottery that had been so carefully handled had, unfortunately, been placed on the precipice to cool. And it didn’t take much, just the slightest jostle, for the piece to fall and shatter and splinter into a million could-have-beens.

 

* * *

 

Carmilla awoke in a cold sweat, the Kant novel open on her chest, sunlight mocking her desperation. Her body heaved, her vision blurred, and her hand was trapped, hanging off the edge of her mattress.

She bolted upright, a spring released, and attempted to yank her hand from its prison. But her fingers hitched over Danny’s, the red-head stirring from her doze at the disruption.

“Carmilla, are you ok—”

“What’s… how…” Carmilla took mental stock of her surroundings, the dogeared book, the mud clods on her quilt, the mid-morning sun peaking through the window. Danny, fully dressed, on the floor of her lofted bed space.

“How did you get up here?” Carmilla questioned.

“I mean, the legs still need some work, but that means the guns have benefited,” Danny smirked, held up a bicep seemingly cut from marble. “You… you sounded like you were having a bad time of it.”

“Oh,” Carmilla said, studying the blanket before her. “Danny, did we—uhm…”

“Huh?” Danny asked, rugged smile bright as Polaris.

“Do you know anything about… mongooses?”

“Mongooses?” Danny chortled, whacked Carmilla against the arm. “Hardly. Mongeese. Mongooses. That’s a weird early morning conversation-starter, even for you, Dead Girl.”

Carmilla choked down tears.

“And your muscle cramps… you haven’t…” Carmilla let the inquiry linger.

Danny bobbed her head, as if prompting Carmilla to speak; when she didn’t, Danny rubbed the back of her neck, seemingly at a loss.

“I mean, I stopped having those cramps weeks ago, especially after the Epsom salt baths. What is with you, Carm?”

“It’s nothing to concern yourself with, Gingersnap,” Carmilla thrummed with levity. “My own idiotic musings,” and with that, Carmilla dismissed her hopes with a negligent hand wave. “I’m sure you were just craving the opportunity to show off, but let’s get you back downstairs, shall we?”

“I can probably do it—”

“Too late, here we are,” Carmilla said, engaging her super speed. She placed Danny on her feet within arm’s reach of her quarterstaff. “Leave it to you to choose a crutch that doubles as a weapon.”

“It’s handier than a cane, has a longer reach,” Danny explained, twirling it about.

“Not inside,” Carmilla snapped. “You’ll knock everything to the ground.”

“Like you’d clean it up.”

“I don't want anything to shatter," Carmilla mumbled. "You’re just making it harder on yourself.”

“I don’t think so,” Danny countered, clutching the staff as it took the full of her weight. “Another two weeks and Drake says I can get on the treadmill. From there on out—” Danny clapped the flap of her palms together and _whooshed_ one hand forward, an indication of progress. “—smooth sailing. And then you’ll get to take a break, and I’ll be back at it.”

“Back at it…” Carmilla nodded to herself.

“Seriously, what is _up_ with you today? You’re acting weirder than usual, which is saying something.”

“You’re ready to get back to it? Back to fighting?” Carmilla asked.

_Back to dying?_

Danny screwed up her face and slowed her speech, as if she were speaking to a particularly dim toddler. “Yeeeeeees,” she drawled. “And I’m sure you’ll be glad to have me out of your hair.”

_Danny threaded her fingers through Carmilla’s hair, clutched at the soft base of her skull while Carmilla licked the sides of Danny’s thighs and drew a climax with her mouth alone._

Carmilla shook the garbled images (wishes-dreams-impossibilities) from her mind’s eye.

“You’re never going to stop,” Carmilla’s melancholic statement.

“You’re damn right I’m not,” Danny’s ebullient testament.

“Good for you, Gingersnap,” Carmilla said, shoving her hands into her pockets. “Good that you’re not moping about. I’m heading out.”

“Aren’t you tired? You’re normally still passed out at this hour,” Danny said, lowering herself to the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“Crunches. Core build-up. Can’t wait to hit that treadmill.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine without me,” Carmilla said, looking fondly at the bookshelf on the far side of the cabin. Looking fondly at the woman curling upwards, powered by abdominals and will power.

“I’m good. C-catch y-you l-later!” Danny huffed.

Carmilla stepped outside of the cabin and shut the door, placed her hand on the wooden panel, tried to see if she could feel Daniele’s heartbeat, pulsing through those floorboards.

She couldn’t.

Goodbye dearest, darling Daniele.

My wild, brave little mongoose.

My lionheart.

Carmilla fled like the coward she was. Better to leave now and live without. Better not to risk the loss.

* * *

 

 

_NO LIGHT NO LIGHT IN YOUR BRIGHT BLUE EYES_

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got soooooooo long you guys. And I nearly put it up as two but I wanted the whole thing from Carmilla's pov. There's typos cause I'm sick as a dog, so bare with me, please. Thanks for all of the appreciation with this so far! Your feedback is really encouraging :D 
> 
> If it wasn't clear, these past few chapter took place in flashback, and then, at the end of this chapter, we circle back to the second part in the series (No Light No Light). I have no idea why I structured it that way, but here we are.

**Author's Note:**

> I find the title kinda ironic considering the hooplah that emerged when this song was originally released. This'll be the final part of the I'm Not Gonna Write You a Love Song universe. Thanks for sticking around for it!


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